a.» . . . .flwx.’ urnflaw?rr{ . .k. . . 5. I! J. J u. 25.9. ....§, ”r” in». This is to certify that the dissertation entitled Confronting the Challenges of Field-Based Teacher Education: New Roles and Practices for University and School-Based Teacher Educators presented by Patricia J. Norman has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for Ph. D . degree in Teacher Educat ion gm an m fiajor professor Date 5' lO‘Ol MSU is an Affirmatiw Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0-12771 USE/ARV 7 Michigan State University PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record. To AVOID FINES return on or before date due. MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested. om pm: 1 2 DATE DUE DATE DUE £6.72 951 $12” 6/01 c-JCIRC/DateDuepBS-p. 15 CONFRONTING THE CHALLENGES OF FIELD-BASED TEACHER EDUCATION: NEW ROLES AND PRACTICES FOR UNIVERSITY AND SCHOOL-BASED TEACHER EDUCATORS By Patricia J. Norman A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Teacher Education 2001 ABSTRACT CONFRONTING THE CHALLENGES OF FIELD-BASED TEACHER EDUCATION: NEW ROLES AND PRACTICES FOR UNIVERSITY AND SCHOOL-BASED TEACHER EDUCATORS By Patricia J. Norman Current teacher education reforms call for extended field experiences where interns learn to teach in the company of thoughtful, experienced teachers. A large gap exists between the rhetoric of reform-minded teacher education and what actually transpires in interns’ field experiences. If current reforms are to succeed, greater support and guidance must be given to mentor teachers so that they become strong teachers of teaching. Drawing on an emerging tradition whereby researchers use their own teaching as a site for conducting research, the researcher documented and analyzed her efforts as a field-based teacher educator to assist a group of six mentor teachers in developing their practice as school-based teacher educators. The dissertation describes several core challenges she faced including developing and using records of mentoring practice to foster analytic conversation with the mentors, helping them construct and act on a learning to teach curriculum for the interns, and accessing her practical knowledge when individually coaching mentors. While the teachers developed a deeper understanding of their mentoring role, translating their propositional knowledge into procedural knowledge proved difficult. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The ideas presented in the following pages have developed in collaboration with many others. Particular thanks to Sharon F eiman-Nemser, my dissertation chair, advisor and Team One colleague believed in and strengthened my capacity to think analytically long before I possessed this ability myself. Her persistent, insightful feedback kept me rethinking and rewriting. My committee members, Jenny Denyer, Helen Featherstone and Cheryl Rosaen, provided timely advice, encouragement and feedback. My friend and colleague, Shari Rose, consistently helped me translate other's feedback into a thoughtful plan of action. Cheryl Baldwin patiently answered my questions about the nature of qualitative research and just as patiently put up with my neurotic dog, Scout, so that I could finish writing. I also thank the collaborating teachers and interns at Sandburg Elementary School who graciously allowed me to pursue this dissertation through our joint work. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Sandy who shared her classroom, mentoring practice and responses to data chapter drafis with me. Finally, I wish to thank my family as they played an important role in bringing me to this place in my intellectual journey. My sister, Kathy, faithfully listened to my endless stories (whining) with open mind and compassionate heart, often gently reminding me of the bigger picture. My older brother, Charlie, “shamed” me into finishing with his perennial question, “What year are you on now?” My younger brother, Dan, helped me chart my progress with his own favorite, “What page number are you on?” I thank my father for his support and guidance. Perhaps most importantly, I thank my dearest mother for her generosity, wisdom and compassion. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................. viii LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................. ix CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... l Reforming Field-Based Teacher Education .............................................. 1 Creation of Professional Development Schools ................................ 2 Challenges to Creating High Quality Clinical Learning Experiences ................ 3 Mentors Do Not Teach for Understanding ....................................... 3 Mentors Do Not See Themselves as Teacher of Teaching .................... 6 Mentors Have Not Developed a Mentoring Practice ........................... 9 No Corps of Mentor Teacher Developers Exists .............................. 10 No Well-Developed Curriculum for Learning to Mentor Exists ............... 13 Addressing Problems While Trying to Run the Program .................... 13 Tales From Learning to Mentor .......................................................... 16 The First Debriefmg Conference: Identifying a Problem .................... 18 A Second Failed Attempt ......................................................... 21 Stepping Back: Sharon’s Mentored Assistance ............................... 23 A Final Successful Attempt ...................................................... 25 What and Howl Learned ......................................................... 27 The Research Questions .................................................................. 30 Conclusion .................................................................................. 33 CHAPTER TWO RESEARCH DESIGN .............................................................................. 35 General Context of the Study ............................................................. 35 MSU Internship .................................................................... 36 Collaborating Teachers ........................................................... 36 University Liaisons ................................................................ 37 Specific Context of the Study ............................................................ 37 Role of the Researcher ..................................................................... 39 The Intervention ............................................................................ 40 Collaborating Teacher Study Group ............................................ 41 One-On-One Assistance .......................................................... 43 Data Sources ................................................................................ 44 CT Study Group Sessions ....................................................... 45 Individual Assistance ............................................................ 45 CT Interviews ..................................................................... 46 Data Analysis ............................................................................... 47 Methods for Verification ......................................................... 54 iv CHAPTER THREE THE PEDOGAGY OF USING RECORDS OF PRACTICE TO FOSTER ANALYTIC CONVERSATION ................................. 56 Using Records of Practice ................................................................ 56 Developing a Professional Discourse .......................................... 58 Creating Productive Disequilibritun ............................................ 59 Challenges in Creating, Framing and Facilitating Records of Practice ............. 60 Creating Records of Practice .................................................... 61 Framing Worthwhile Analytic Tasks ........................................... 61 Facilitating our Talk ............................................................... 62 Central Research Question and Data Analysis ......................................... 62 Descriptive Analysis .............................................................. 64 Interpretative Analysis ............................................................ 64 Session One: The Struggle to Develop a Professional Discourse .................... 65 Creating the Records of Practice ................................................ 65 Framing the Analytic Task ....................................................... 67 Facilitating the Talk ............................................................... 68 Analysis of First Session .................................................................. 76 Facilitating the Discussion ....................................................... 76 Framing the Analytic Tasks ...................................................... 79 Creating the Records of Practice ................................................ 80 Session Two: Success in Developing a Professional Discourse ..................... 82 Creating the Record of Practice ................................................. 82 Framing and Using the Records of Practice ................................... 84 Facilitating Our Discussion ...................................................... 85 Analysis of Second Session ............................................................... 91 Creating the Records .............................................................. 92 Framing the Discussion and Sharing the Records ............................ 92 Facilitating the Conversation .................................................... 93 Session Three: Exacting a Price for Our Earlier Success ............................. 98 Unforeseen Decisions ............................................................ 98 Lessons Learned .................................................................. 99 Sharing These Lessons .......................................................... 101 Discussion ................................................................................. 104 Developing Records of Practice ................................................ 105 Framing Our Investigations .................................................... 107 Managing the Talk ............................................................... 109 Learning That and Learning How ............................................. 110 CHAPTER FOUR INSTRUCTIONAL PLANNING: DOING IT, LEARNING IT, TEACHING IT ................................................. 114 ' Planning for Teaching .................................................................... 115 Instructional Planning as a Design Process .................................. 116 Planning for What Kind of Teaching? ........................................ 118 Kinds of Planning ............................................................... 119 The Sandburg CTs: Designers or Adapters of Curriculum? ........................ 122 Learning to Plan for Teaching .......................................................... 125 Challenges Preservice Teachers Face ......................................... 126 The Sandburg Interns: Learning to Plan amid Conflicting Messages ............. 128 Mixed Messages about Writing in Learning to Plan ........................ 128 Mixed Messages about What Kinds of Teaching to Plan for .............. 131 Teaching Planning ........................................................................ 135 Differences in the Way Veterans and Novices Plan ........................ 135 Do Mentor Teachers See Themselves as Curriculum Developers? ........................................................ 136 Invisible Nature of Their Planning ............................................ 137 The Sandburg CTs: Who is Responsible to Teach Planning and How? ........... 137 Recognizing Differences in the Way the CTs and Interns Plan ............ 138 Who Should Teach Planning? .................................................. 140 Teaching Planning in the Abstract or as an Authentic Activity? ....................................................... 141 Mentoring Teachers of Planning ........................................................ 145 Developing a Curriculum of Planning ......................................... 146 Developing a Lesson Plan Format ............................................. 147 When Format Alone Is Not Enough .......................................... 151 Discussion ................................................................................. 155 Instructional Planning ........................................................... 155 Learning Planning ............................................................... 160 Teaching Planning ............................................................... 160 Mentoring Teachers of Planning ............................................... 161 CHAPTER FIVE , MENTORED LEARNING TO MENTOR ..................................................... 163 Interns as “Another Teacher in the Classroom”: A First Portrait of Sandy (1998) ........................................................ 165 Identifying Differences in Our Mentoring Practice: An Initial Co-Observation .................................................. _ ............. 167 Summary of Liz’s Quilt Lesson ................................................ 167 Making Sense of Our Observation ............................................. 169 The Debriefing Conference ..................................................... 173 Analysis of the Co—Observation ................................................ 176 Attending to Subject Matter Knowledge: A Later Co-Observation ............... 180 Summary of Liz’s Science Lesson ............................................. 180 Sharing Our Observations ...................................................... 182 The Debriefing Conference ..................................................... 183 Analysis of Debriefing Conference ........................................... 187 “An Unskilled Person Teaching an Unskilled Person”: A Second Portrait (1999) ................................................................ 189 Getting Off to a Rocky Start in Year Three ........................................... 191 “We’re Not on the Same Page:” The First Planning Session around Sue’s Plan Unit ......................................................... 194 vi Summary of the Planning Session ............................................. 194 Debriefmg the Planning Session ............................................... 197 Analysis of Debriefing Session ................................................ 201 “Actually This is Hard and Thoughtful Work:” The Next Planning Session .............................................................. 203 Summary of Second Planning Session ....................................... 203 Debriefing the Second Planning Session ..................................... 206 Analysis of Second Flaming Session ......................................... 210 From “Support Person” to “Teacher of Teachers”: A Recent Portrait (2000) ................................................................. 212 Toward a Grounded Theory of Mentored Learning to‘ Mentor ..................... 214 CHAPTER SIX THE (IM)POSSIBLE TASK OF MENTOR TEACHER DEVELOPMENT ...................................................... 221 Conceptualizing the Complex Territory of Mentor Teacher Development .......................................................... 221 Core Tasks of Teaching and Mentoring ................................................ 224 Mentoring as a Form of Professional Development .................................. 227 Challenges to Developing a Corps of Mentor Teacher Developers ................ 230 Implications for Policy, Research and Development................................234 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................. 238 APPENDICES ..................................................................................... 247 A: Summary of Sandy’s Calendar Lesson ............................................. 248 B: What Liz and Jan Noticed about Sandy’s Teaching .............................. 251 C: First Co-Planning Record of Practice .............................................. 252 D: Second Co-Planning Record of Practice ........................................... 255 E: Curriculum of Planning ............................................................... 257 F: Sandburg Lesson Plan Format ....................................................... 259 G: “Primary Block Internship Scaffold” ............................................... 260 vii LIST OF TABLES Chapter 2 Table 1: Collaborating Teacher and Intern Pairs ....................................... 38 Table 2: Summary of Collected Data .................................................... 44 Chapter 3 Table 1: Number and Kinds of Turns Taken during First Session ...................................................... 77 Table 2: Number and Kinds of Turns Taken during Second Session .................................................. 93 Chapter 4 Table 1: The Sandburg CTs’ Dominant Mode of Planning ......................... 123 Chapter 6 Table 1: Core Tasks of Teaching and Mentoring .................................... 225 viii LIST OF FIGURES Chapter 2 Figure 1: Layout of the Data Chapters ................................................... 54 Chapter 4 Figure l: Mentoring Teachers of Planning ............................................ 156 Chapter 5 Figure 1: A Model of Mentoring Learning to Mentor ............................... 216 Chapter 6 Figure 1: The Interrelated Teaching Practices of Mentor Teacher Development ........................................... 222 ix Chapter One Introduction Reforming Field-Based Preservice Teacher Education The question of how to create educative field experiences that support novices’ learning to teach has remained a contentious and unresolved issue in preservice teacher education. While some university teacher educators argue that prospective teachers need more practical experience, others warn that extending the amount of time in classrooms only increases the chances that teacher candidates will adopt the conservative practices to which they are exposed. As Cohen notes, “experience with teaching figures both as the salvation of teacher education and its greatest enemy” (1998, p. 167). Nearly a century ago Dewey argued that practical work in the classroom was not to be an end in itself but an opportunity to develop “intellectual methods required for personal and independent mastery of practical skill” (1904, p. 315). He maintained that novices need to establish a strong foundation in educational principles and subject matter before worrying about and attending to day-to-day teaching issues. Otherwise, a premature focus on performance leads a student teacher to focus solely on proficiency. Thus gaining immediate skill comes at the cost of further growth and leaves the novice submerged in circumstance without the critical habits of mind or analytical tools to evaluate the latest educational fad. Although Dewey believed that the chasm between school and university, theory and practice is bridgeable, historically university teacher educators have remained largely unsuccessful in their efforts. Preservice teachers still complain that their education courses are too theoretical and their more practically oriented field experiences are most valuable (Lortie, 1975; Evertson, 1990). However, because preservice teachers are often placed in traditional classroom settings where teachers tell what they know and students learn by regurgitating presented information (Goodlad, 1984; Jackson, 1986), novices often leave their field experiences with a limited and narrow view of teaching and learning (Goodlad, 1990). Maintaining control of students becomes the goal rather than tapping into students’ needs, desires, purposes and capacities in order to create the conditions that support their further learning. Creation of professional development schools. Recognizing the need to change not only preservice teachers’ field experiences but the professional culture into which novices are inducted, a number of recent ambitious teacher education initiatives have linked teacher education reform with efforts to restructure schools into centers of sustained and serious inquiry (Levine, 1992). One such initiative developed by The Holmes Group (1990) calls for the creation of professional development schools where professional education, teaching for understanding and inquiry drive university and school collaboration. Reformers claim that PDSs can create strong field experiences by enabling student teachers to learn to teach in the company of experienced teachers, sometimes for a full year (N CTAF, 1996; Holmes Group, 1990; Carnegie Forum on Education and Economy, 1986). These extended clinical experiences rest on the assumption that learning to teach in the company of a thoughtful mentor is a powerful way to induct novices into the intellectual and practical challenges of reform-minded teaching (Cochran-Smith, 1991a). Challenges to Creating High Quality Clinical Learning Experiences Simply extending the length of time teacher candidates spend in the field will not insure that their experiences are educative. The success of teacher preparation programs such as the one at Michigan State is largely dependent on the classroom teachers (e.g. collaborating teachers) who agree to work with interns. Currently, several formidable challenges limit classroom teachers’ capacity to help novices learn to teach in the context of actual practice. Mentors do not teach for understanding. First, collaborating teachers often do not model the kind of reform-minded teaching promoted by MSU’s teacher preparation program sometimes referred to as “teaching for understanding.” “Understanding” means that students not only know but can think and act with what they know (Perkins, 1998). Learning entails actively constructing understandings of our world by synthesizing new experiences and ideas into what we have previously come to understand. Understanding is demonstrated when students can put their knowledge to work in posing and solving problems, building arguments and constructing representations or products. “Teaching for understanding” rests on the idea that teachers facilitate the construction of knowledge rather than disseminate it. They do so by posing problems of immediate or emerging relevance to students, structuring learning opportunities around core concepts that extend across the curriculum, and seeking out, valuing and using children’s present conceptions and questions to help them develop deeper subject matter understanding (McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993). Teachers do more listening as they elicit students’ thinking in order to interpret their ideas and assess student learning. Students do more explaining as they investigate authentic problems and generate solutions. In reality, few teachers actually teach in conceptually oriented, reform-minded ways (Cohen, McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993). Teachers continue to treat knowledge as self-contained, independent of the situations in which it was learned and used. By failing to recognize the constructed and situated nature of knowledge, teachers treat knowledge as relatively fixed and teach it as decontextualized facts and abstract principles. Thus school children rarely have opportunities to engage in authentic activity in schools (Resnick, 1987). This means that interns continue to be placed in traditional classroom settings where children may gain information but have no idea how to use it in authentic practice. Because student teachers often take on the beliefs and values of their cooperating teachers (Zeichner, 1980), it is not surprising that mentor teachers often promote conservative norms and practices (Zeichner & Tabachnick, 1981; F eiman-Nemser, Parker & Zeichner, 1993). This inevitably limits the potential for field-based teacher education reforms to transform teaching. Rather than producing well-started novices who enter the profession having established a vision of teaching for understanding that they should continue to develop in their practice, traditional internship placements may launch beginning teachers who provide similar kinds of conservative instruction that they received as students and witnessed as teacher candidates. As a university liaison who supported groups of interns and their collaborating teachers in MSU’s teacher preparation program, I witnessed first-hand the challenges interns face when placed with CTs who do not teach for understanding. As part of their internship, teacher candidates take a semester-long graduate course on the teaching and learning of mathematics. They study recent reform documents such as the NCTM standards (1989) which redefine what it means to teach and learn math. Challenging traditional notions of teaching mathematics as a fixed and discrete set of computational skills where learning entails giving “right answers,” current math education reforms stress problem solving skills and mathematical reasoning. The interns are encouraged to pay careful attention to students as they make sense of concepts and ideas, to design worthwhile mathematical tasks and to learn how to manage mathematical discussions. Early in her internship Jo often watched her CT, Terry, use the first ten minutes of class to correct students’ math homework. Terry gave the students the right answers while the students individually corrected their work. While jointly observing this daily task, Jo and I recognized that we knew very little about how the students arrived at right or wrong answers, thus making it difficult to assess students’ understanding. During one such observation, Terry asked the students what they thought the percentage of .2 is. Most students incorrectly responded, “2 percent.” Terry stated this was the wrong answer and encouraged them to try again. One boy hesitantly offered, “20 percent?” Terry responded, “Yes, that’s the right answer.” The child replied, “But I just guessed.” Terry assured him, “That’s okay. You guessed right.” The child repeated, “But I just guessed.” Terry reassured him, “It’s the right answer!” and continued with the next problem. The incident suggests that Terry may have held a traditional view of mathematics as “right answers.” When Jo took over the task of correcting daily homework, I encouraged her to elicit the students’ thinking so that she could better assess their understanding. However, asking the students to explain their thinking often took longer than the ten minutes Terry allotted for homework correction. When .10 spent 25 minutes going over the previous night’s homework, Terry later approached her and told her to stop asking the students to explain their answers because it not only took too long, but the students often did not know how they had arrived at an answer. Was Terry’s advice an attempt to help Jo better pace future lessons? Did Terry believe that eliciting students’ mathematical reasoning was inappropriate all the time? This anecdote begins to paint the complicated and contested terrain of reforming field-based teacher education. Mentors do not see themselves as teachers of teaching. Even if sufficient numbers of classroom teachers modeled practices associated with reform-minded teaching, simply being placed in an exemplary teacher’s classroom does not necessarily mean that interns will learn that kind of teaching. Being a strong teacher of children does not automatically translate into the necessary skills needed to carry out the role of school- based teacher educator (Koemer, 1992; Feiman-Nemser, 1998a). Historically, mentor teachers have received little formal preparation for their role (Sparks & Brodeur, 1987). Thus mentor teachers must figure out for themselves what they are supposed to do when working with interns (Abell et al, 1995). Because experience has been their best teacher and they have “learned the ropes” on their own (Lortie, 1975), mentor teachers may believe that they should stay out of the way so that novices can demonstrate their know- how (Feiman-Nemser & Beasley, 1996). Stepping out of the way can create problems for both mentors and novices, however. My own student teaching experience illustrates the challenges novices face when working with classroom teachers who do not see themselves as teachers of teaChing. Placed with a reform-minded first grade teacher, I initially thought I had died and gone to heaven. The students sat at tables, conversing freely about projects they conceptualized and carried out themselves. Centers provided many opportunities for free exploration. Happily, textbooks collected dust on a forgotten shelf. My cooperating teacher, Claire, seemed to draw from an endless supply of resources to engage students in meaningful learning activities. This was a vision of the possible. I immersed myself in the vibrant life of this classroom, paying careful attention to how Claire interacted with the kids. I wrote down specific language she used. I memorized the routines of the classroom and pitched in when I felt comfortable. I worked hard to get to know the students and the curriculum, thoroughly enjoying opportunities to explore the content with them. Then my four weeks of lead teaching arrived. I vividly recall Claire telling me the upcoming curricular theme while handing me boxes full of materials that she had used in previous years. Since this was lead teaching, I was expected to develop and teach lessons around the curriculum for that month. Completely overwhelmed by the prospect, I took the boxes home over the weekend, looking carefully at all of the children’s books, content books, resource materials, directions for experiments, and various other resources. How was I supposed to transform this “stuff” into actual lessons and a coherent “day/night” unit that would last several weeks? I felt inadequate and inept. How had I gotten so far in my teacher preparation program without knowing how to create thoughtful plans around rich curricular resources? This question haunted me throughout my lead teaching. I did my best to create a day/night unit that integrated language arts and science activities. In retrospect I realize that I produced individual lessons which did not fit into some larger whole. I muddled through lessons without clear goals, grateful that the students seemed willing to go along with me. Claire explained that it was difficult for her to “give up the reigns” and let me teach on my own, so she physically removed herself from the classroom for a significant chunk of my lead teaching. Perhaps she also found it difficult to observe me teach due to the fact that I had little idea how my lessons hung together to create a coherent study. Here was a thoughtful teacher who could offer me a vision of the kind of progressive teaching I wanted to learn and practice. But seeing this kind of teaching and learning how to do it myself were two very different activities. While I observed Claire teach, much of what she did to prepare for teaching remained invisible to me since I had no access to the intellectual work she put into planning for instruction or into the interactive decisions she made during instruction. Thus when the time came to develop and teach my own plans, I had little if any experience or understanding to draw on. This lack of clear guidance and support kept me from understanding what is involved in planning responsive curricula or developing an approach to planning. In addition, by actually leaving the classroom, Claire was in no position to help me learn from my teaching. As Feiman-Nemser and Buchmann (1987) point out, being placed in an exemplary teacher’s classroom does not necessarily mean that a student teacher will have necessary opportunities to learn. After studying two student teachers and the role their cooperating teachers played in their learning, the researchers found that the cooperating teachers’ well-meaning praises and sole focus on classroom management did not help the student teachers productively make sense of and learn from their teaching experiences. 777118 while a student teacher may be given freedom in what and how she teaches, she may lack necessary support for learning if the cooperating teacher does not act as a teacher educator. Mentors have not developed a mentoring practice. Even if collaborating teachers view their intern as a learner of teaching and develop an understanding of their role as school-based teacher educators, they many times lack the knowledge and skills needed to mentor novices. Mentors need to have ideas about what novices need to learn to teach and how they can be helped to learn that curriculum. Mentors must help interns prepare for, pull ofii and later analyze their teaching. They must know how to use practice -- their own and their novice’s -- as a site for learning to teach, and how to ground conversation in practice in order to take novices inside the intellectual work of teaching (McIntyre et a1, 1993; Feiman-Nemser & Beasley, 1996). While talk becomes a critical tool for the mentor teacher in supporting the novice’s learning, she may find herself being asked to draw on skills she has not had opportunities to develop. The social organization of schools and professional norms of autonomy and non-interference often leave teachers isolated in the privacy of their own classrooms (Lortie, 1975). This means that teachers rarely have Opportunities to observe colleagues teach or to talk collaboratively about teaching in sustained and rigorous ways (Little, 1993). Instead, teachers participate in conventional professional development opportunities where outside experts hold “one-shot workshops,” disseminating fiagmented, shallow and pre-packaged information about instruction (Hawley & Valli, 1999), knowledge that is disconnected from teachers’ immediate problems of practice (Lieberman, 1995) and the specific contexts in which teachers work. Without chances to experience and engage in practice-centered talk as classroom teachers by systematically studying their own and their colleagues’ practice, mentor teachers may not know how to foster and sustain such conversation with prospective teachers. In addition, mentors need to explain why they do what they do (Tomlinson, 1995). In reality, teachers often have difficulty articulating what they know and how they make decisions about particular pedagogical moves (Carter, 1990) in part because teachers spend more time ‘doing things’ than they do explicating what they do and why (Connelly and Clandinin, 1988). Thus tapping into their practical knowledge to help novices learn in and from practice remains a real challenge for many mentor teachers. A further impediment to collaborating teachers developing a strong mentoring practice lies in the fact that those new to the role of school-based teacher educator do not have concrete models on which to draw. Lave and Wenger (1991) state that novices new to a community of practice need broad access to full participants within that community. By watching old-timers in action, newcomers can develop a general understanding of membership. However, because so few collaborating teachers have developed a strong mentoring practice, such models do not exist. No corps of mentor teacher developers exists. The problem then becomes one of helping mentor teachers to develop a new vision for their role as teachers of teaching and to expand their capacity in guiding, supporting and assessing interns’ leaming to teach. Such assistance is not always forthcoming, in part because of university teacher educators’ misguided assumptions. For example, some have assumed that cooperating teachers just “know what to do” and how to do it (Sudzina, Giebelhaus & Coolican, 1997). Other university teacher educators believe that mentor teachers do not want gUidance, or that time constraints keep them from participating in training, or that they 10 will resent the implication that they need assistance since they are already experienced professional educators (Garland & Shippy, 1991; Grimmett & Ratslaff, 1986; Rikard & Veal, 1996). In contrast, researchers have found that cooperating teachers report wanting more preparation (Korinck, 1989). Perhaps more importantly, no corps of mentor teacher developers exists who are able to create the structures and learning opportunities necessary to develop collaborating teachers’ mentoring practice at the local level. Because university teacher educators often have not developed their own capacity to mentor novices, they are not well positioned to induct collaborating teachers into the practice of school-based teacher education. Thus the university teacher educator, like the collaborating teacher needing to learn the practice of mentoring, must develop a new role and practice to address mentor teacher development. Traditionally, university teacher educators have served as field supervisors, responsible for periodically supporting and evaluating student teachers’ performance, oftentimes utilizing a model of clinical supervision (Garman et a1, 1987). Clinical supervision originally grew out of Harvard’s MAT program where supervisors tried to circumvent the lack of support novices received from mentors by working intensively with preservice teachers in sustained sequences of planning, observation and analysis in order to improve student teachers’ practice (Goldhammer, 1969). One of the great contributions of Goldhammer’s pioneering work is that it offers novices serious, sustained support while engaging them in the process of analyzing and evaluating their own performance. 11 While training mentor teachers in clinical supervision might strengthen their capacity to help novices learn from their teaching, such training would not help mentors think about how to use their own teaching practice as a tool for novices’ learning. Nor would the clinical supervision cycle help mentors learn how to support novices while they teach. Thus it is unclear how well clinical supervision as a mentoring practice maps on to the goals of field-based preservice teacher education where novices learn to teach under the support and guidance of an experienced teacher rather than an “expert supervisor.” More recently, Costa and Garmston (1994) have developed a form of clinical supervision known as “cognitive coaching,” “a set of nonjudgmental practices” centered on a similar cycle of pre-conference, observation and post-conference designed to enhance teachers’ intellectual grth (p. 13). Cognitive coaching differs from earlier forms of clinical supervision in that coaches serve as consultants rather than more knowledgeable “experts,” raising questions designed to help teachers talk out loud about their thinking so that over time they become their own reflective coaches (Garmston et a1, 1993). By helping teachers explore the thinking behind their practice, the cognitive coaching model has great potential in helping teachers become more informed decision- makers and over time stronger practitioners. However, like earlier forms of clinical supervision, cognitive coaching has shortcomings as a sole model for collaborating teachers’ mentoring. Because cognitive coaches serve a consultative role, relying on the principal strategies of questioning, paraphrasing, and providing data from the teacher’s teaChing (Costa & Garmston, 1994), it is unclear how collaborating teachers might share their practical knowledge for teaching with interns. 12 No well-developed curriculum for learning to mentor exists. In addition to insufficient numbers of mentor teacher developers, it remains unclear what the curriculum of learning to mentor includes. The use of the terms mentor and mentoring have dramatically increased in educational reform literature in recent years (McIntyre et a1, 1993). Mentoring generally refers to working with beginning teachers as they are inducted into the profession. More recently the term as been extended to include assisting student teachers and interns in preservice programs. Helping someone learn to teach in the mentor’s classroom (e.g. preservice teacher education) is very different from helping someone teach in their own classroom (e.g. induction). There is neither consensus nor clarity about what mentoring means in relation to learning to teach (Jacobi, 1991). Much of the literature on mentoring equates this role with offering “support, “guidance,” and “assistance” (e. g. Odell, 1990; Gold, 1996); however, such terms “say little about mentoring as an educational activity in helping novices learn to teach” (Feiman-Nemser, 1998b, p. 5) and do not offer a serious conceptualization of the mentor’s practice (Little, 1990). Addressing problems while trying to run the program. In essence, each key player in the internship must develop a new professional practice. The intern must learn the practice of teaching, the collaborating teacher must learn the (under-conceptualized) practice of mentoring, and the university teacher educator must learn the practices of mentoring and mentor teacher development. Schon (1987) defines a professional practice as “the province of a community of practitioners who share... the traditions of a calling (p. 32). Such traditions include operation within particular institutional settings (e.g. the court, the school, the hospital) and shared conventions of action. Schon further states that 13 while practitioners of a given professional practice agree upon certain activities, they will undoubtedly confront “indeterminate zones of practice” -- moments that are characterized by uncertainty, uniqueness, instability and value conflict -- which defy predetermined procedures and simple answers. Membership in a professional community means that the practitioner is able to define problems before solving them. This ability to “make sense of an uncertain situation that initially makes no sense” entails a kind of professional artistry characterized by intelligent, reflective thought (p. 40). When a novice begins to learn a new professional practice, she faces a seeming contradiction -- she recognizes that she does not know how to do something, yet learning entails doing the very thing that she does not yet know how to do. She must come to learn through action, yet at the outset she “can neither do it nor recognize it when she sees it” (Schon, 1987, p. 83). Interns are confronted by this “learning paradox” as they attempt to learn the practice of teaching. Prospective teachers must engage in teaching even though they are not yet able to teach. In theory, the mentor teacher can serve as a novice’s cognitive coach, assisting her performance by helping the intern learn about teaching through the process of engaging in and reflecting on the act of teaching. The mentor discerns what the novice does and does not understand and where difficulties lie based on the novice’s initial efforts. The mentor then must choose to demonstrate, explain or question, constantly assessing the effectiveness of her intervention. In reality, however, the intern is not the only person who faces a learning paradox. The collaborating teacher, too, faces this dilemma in learning the practice of mentoring. She is expected to mentor her intern and develop new ways of talking about teaching even though at the outset she does not know how to offer thoughtful guidance or structure 14 and sustain educative conversation. Ideally, the university field-based teacher educator could serve as the collaborating teacher’s coach, helping her learn from her work with an intern to develop her mentoring practice. However, most university field-based teacher educators are untrained graduate students or faculty without particular expertise for this kind of work (Lanier & Little, 1985; Byrd & Foxx, 1996). This means that the university teacher educator is caught in a dual learning paradox. At the same time she is learning how to help interns learn about and from teaching by engaging in mentoring activities, she must also learn how to support collaborating teachers in their work with interns. Unlike Schon’s model of developing professional practices, rarely do well- equipped coaches exist in field-based teacher education to support the novice, the collaborating teacher or the university teacher educator in learning by doing. Rather, they are all constructing new roles and practices while simultaneously enacting them. Meanwhile, the internship program keeps functioning and we cannot stop to wait until the pieces are in place. To borrow a metaphor from Deborah Meier, trying to develop collaborating teachers’ capacity to guide, support and assess novices’ learning to teach is akin to attempting to fix the train as it is running down the track. The Holmes Group vision for high quality, standards-based clinical training settings is compelling. MSU’s decision to adopt that vision for its teacher preparation program is inspiring. However, it all rests on a shaky foundation in the absence of adequate numbers of teachers who can function as school-based teacher educators and/or a corps of mentor teacher developers who can help collaborating teachers learn to mentor novices. If we want to pull off the Holmes vision, we need well-conceptualized 15 experiments that link reform-minded visions of teaching with views about mentored learning to teach and ideas about mentor teacher development. This research attempts to do that by exploring what happened when I as a field- based teacher educator assisted a group of collaborating teachers in understanding their role and developing their practice as teachers of teaching. As a university liaison in MSU’s teacher preparation program, I was keenly aware of the need to help collaborating teachers become stronger mentors. Initially I had been so overwhelmed by the challenge of supporting interns that for the first few years, I focused my own learning on how to mentor interns rather than how to support collaborating teachers.l Until I felt better “inside” the practice of mentoring, I was in no position to help the CTs strengthen their capacity to enact their new role. Tales from Learning to Mentor In my fourth year as a liaison, I began working in an elementary school new to the internship program, bringing what Cochran-Smith (1991a) labels a “critical dissonance” lens to my field-based work. I worried that the collaborating teachers’ conservative practices would counteract the ideas espoused by the teacher preparation program so that the interns ran the risk of perpetuating the traditional practices they observed. With a real sense Of urgency, I quickly attempted to help the interns challenge the teaching they saw, pointing out ways that their CT’s practices did not embody the professional standards by Which the interns were assessed. Failing to recognize the tentative nature of the ' Part of my learning included strengthening my teaching practice. I returned to classroom teaChing for a year under the tutelage of a master teacher because it felt hypocritical to help novices develop instructional practices which were not a part of my own teaching repertoire. l6 relationships that the interns were forming with their CTs and me, I did not consider how threatening my critique of their mentor’s practices felt to them. One intern in particular, Carole, seemed very enamored of her collaborating teacher’s practice, which I considered conservative. Attempts to help Carole critically examine her CT’s teaching as well as her own met with resistance and anger. I was deeply troubled by the stance Carole took, but I lacked the ability to assess my own role in creating our difficulties. We quickly entered into a “learning bind,” “a process of systematic miscommunication” that develops when a “student’s initially resistant and defensive stance” is coupled with an equally problematic stance on the part of the instructor (Schon, 1987, pp. 126-7). I had been aware of our learning bind from the beginning, but my initial understanding of our combative struggles was limited to focusing on the role Carole had played. I had been painfully aware of the ways in which Carole had demonstrated resistance and defensiveness, much less so about how my own stance and practice cemented our systematic miscommunication. Wanting to examine more closely what had caused Carole and me to develop such an unproductive relationship and to consider how I might “unbind” it, I enrolled in a graduate seminar offered by Sharon Feiman-Nemser designed to help graduate students learn in and from their own efforts to support novices in MSU’s teacher preparation program. This course enabled me to do what I had never done befor -- design and conduct an inquiry around a question that had grown out of my emerging practice. I began tape recording and transcribing a series of debriefing conferences I held with Carole. After developing these artifacts of my practice we would then, in a collaborative setting, systematically analyze my actual efforts to help a novice learn. 1? The process enabled me to identify a problematic feature of my practice. Unlike Schon (1987) who suggests that the coach must draw on what the student is saying to extend the teacher’s agenda and the student’s understanding, I would respond to Carole’s comments with ideas that were completely disconnected from hers. Through Sharon’s mentored assistance I developed tools to address this vulnerability so that I was able to move my practice forward. This experience as a learner of mentoring significantly shaped how I subsequently approached mentor teacher development, strengthened my capacity as a mentor developer and ultimately framed and pursued this study several years later. For these reasons, I describe this learning experience in some detail. The first debriefing conference: Identifying a problem. During lead teaching, I observed Carole teach a lesson on adjectives as part of a literature unit on the novel, Helen Keller. As I watched the lesson I had no idea why she chose to teach this content or how it deepened the students’ understanding of or connection to the book. Carole began by asking the students to define the word “adjective.” After verifying their ideas with the dictionary’s definition, the students offered a number of examples that led Carole to believe they understood what an adjective is. She then showed them a stuffed animal, asking them to brainstorm “how it makes you feel, what you think of. You want to describe it.” Failing to recognize the problematic nature of her directions, Carole seemed surprised and flustered when the students suggested nouns, adverbs and phrases in addition to adjectives. She then went on to show them five objects and play three different pieces of music, each time giving them the same directions to describe how it made them feel or what they thought of. She frequently implored them, “Give me something closer” when they did not offer an adjective. 18 Finally, Carole had the students work in small groups to brainstorm “about Helen Keller, what she’s like and what we think of when we hear her name.” Not surprisingly, the students used various parts of speech. Answers included blind, fat, Braille, Scarlet Fever, she eats like a pig, had chickens, horrifying and insane. She seemed unsure what she was trying to get the students to learn even though she gave them eight different activities in one hour for practice. I was amazed that the students did not rise up and revolt in protest. It reminded me of Goodlad’s (1984) damning description of classrooms where students, in the midst of mindless instruction, remain somehow passively content. When we sat down to talk immediately after the lesson, Carole voiced frustration with several students who leave the classroom twice a week for language arts instruction with the reading specialist. When they rejoin Carole for reading the remaining three days, they have often missed so many activities that they simply cannot jump into the novel and make sense of it. In her opening comments, she raised several critical issues with which she had to contend. How should she work with students who are pulled out of the classroom for special services? Does it make sense to ask them to participate in activities when they haven’t read the novel and so don’t have a shared understanding of the story? She also expressed dissatisfaction with her current practice, suggesting a willingness to question her teaching and examine alternatives. Moreover, she framed her concern as an indirect question to me, in essence asking me what I thought about her situation. This is significant given the fact that until this point she seemed to believe I had little to offer her. Instead of responding to her desire to make sense of this troubling situation, I was intent upon making her feel good about her lesson in an effort to be responsive to what I 19 saw as her perennial need to know she was on the right track. I referred to several students (none of them students receiving special resources) who seemed to understand what adjectives were. I think it’s so exciting because you’re really getting their ideas. Some of them were right on target. Every time you said ‘can you tell me that in a single word?’ he was able to offer an adjective. Like ‘eats like a pig,’ he said ‘impolite!’ He was getting it but the other kids aren’t there yet... My response can be explained in part by my continued wariness in bringing up concerns that might lead her to think I was criticizing her. However, she herself had raised a difficulty. This utter lack of responsiveness highlighted my own ambivalent feelings about our relationship. My weak and indirect attempt to raise my concerns about what the students had learned dismissed Carole’s thoughtful identification of her own issue to pursue. We were still in a learning bind because I continued to talk past her. Carole, however, was at least willing to be responsive to me. She acknowledged what I had said and shared her own observation of what specifically the students seemed to understand. In this way, Carole made a significant effort to work with me, not against me by abandoning the issue she raised in order to explore my own. However, my next turn demonstrates that I did not clearly follow through on my previous line of thought around the students’ ideas. I really want you to clue into the directions when you watch the video tape. When you said ‘I’m going to show you these six things and you’re going to describe them,’ describing is different than saying ‘Give me adjectives that describe them.’ See the difference? I moved from considering what the students did or did not understand to a monologue on what was problematic about her directions. Instead of allowing Carole the opportunity to consider how her directions influenced the nature of the students’ responses, I fell back on a teaching-as-telling model by simply stating what was wrong. While I finally found a 20 way to be explicit and direct, this move did not make sense given the fact that I had videotaped the lesson and thus could let Carole draw her own insights from watching her teaching. Many of these insights into my practice were raised as the course instructor, my peers and I read through the transcript of the conference together. Sharon, in particular, had structured our analysis by limiting our attention to the first page of the transcript then so that we could analyze this excerpt turn by turn, determining what each turn was about and whether and how it responded to the turn that had come before it. Had I not revisited the conference by first making a transcript and then subjecting my practice to our collaborative analysis in the course, I would not have gained these understandings. A second failed attempt. While embarrassed at how poorly I had facilitated the conversation, I remained determined to help Carole learn from the lesson she had taught. I had suggested that Carole watch the videotape of her lesson at home so that we could talk about it later. When we met again, I came armed with pre-planned questions that were much more direct and clearly focused on my concerns about her purposes for teaching adjectives. In addition, Sharon’s advice to listen hard to Carole’s responses echoed in my head as I opened the conversation by asking Carole to share what she thought of the video. While the question was purposefully open-ended, I was not prepared for Carole’s response. In the same way that Carole seemed to become increasingly derailed when the students offered unanticipated answers, I, too, became flustered by her responses to my question. Boy, I’m boring! No, I’m kidding. That wasn’t a super-exciting lesson. But I guess that’s okay... I saw things that I miss [when teaching]. John was eating something out of his desk! I’m going to show the class the video, and then I’m gonna bust him for it. I mean he was blatantly opening the desk and putting something in his 21 mouth! But when you’re walking around, thinking about what you’re teaching, you don’t even catch some things that are really, really obvious. Instead of acting on the opening that she had created to explore why the students might have found the lesson boring, I commiserated, “It’s really impossible to see all the things that go on.” At this point I still had a limited understanding of Schon’s idea of the coach using the student’s answers to move the conversation forward in productive ways. I equated this concept with active listening. Still hoping to move the conversation beyond catching a boy who ate his lunch in class, I asked Carole what she had noticed about her teaching but again found myself nonplused by her answer. I noticed that I didn’t reprimand anybody, but I was trying to use the positive. Um, I walked around a lot. That’s good instead of just standing. I noticed [while watching the tape] that you were just going all over. I’m like, I probably shouldn’t be walking around so much because you probably got dizzy with the camera. I found the students to be incredibly complacent and good-natured. Therefore, I did not understand Carole’s focus on “management.” Nor could I believe that this far into the second semester of her internship, she was still zeroed in on her general performance without connecting it to student learning. I tried to demonstrate that I heard what she said even though I did not see its significance given everything else that was in the video. Instead of raising this tension or offering my own observations since I, too, had watched the video of her lesson, I fell into the trap of keeping my dilemma to myself, saying, “You probably got dizzy watching the video. I apologize if the quality wasn’t so great.” While I cared little about the quality of the video, Carole again demonstrated uptake by persisting with this line of thought. She liked how I “zoomed into one group when they were working in groups” because it gave her the chance to hear what the students were really talking about. Rather than asking Carole to share what specifically 22 she had noticed as the small group discussed adjectives to describe Helen Keller, I just sat there feeling like the conversation was going nowhere. However, I was leery to attempt to move it forward. I simply waited for Carole to state what had seemed so obvious to me while watching her teach. It had yet to occur to me that using the video of her teaching as a tool for her learning was a skill, not something that Carole should know how to do on her own. Therefore 1 should not have been so surprised and unhappy when Carole continued to share what she noticed about her teaching. What else? I hate being on film. I was thinking, ‘Geez! That’s what I look like in that outfit!?’ I’m never wearing that outfit again until my self-confidence is a little bit higher. I looked like I was pregnant! ...I made my mom watch it with me, and my fiancé watched a little but then he got bored so he left. While she raised the issue of boredom again, I remained unwilling to address this topic myself. It had yet to dawn on me that the concern I wanted to raise with Carole around her responses to students’ ideas was the very issue I was struggling with in my own practice as a teacher educator. That is, like Carole, I seemed to have anticipated certain “right” answers in response to my questions, and again like Carole, I seemed completely unable to respond to answers that did not fall into these predetermined “correct” categories. Stepping back: Sharon’s mentored assistance. It wasn’t until I analyzed this second conference with my colleagues that I finally began to realize I lacked ideas about how I could have moved the dialogue forward. I knew what my goals were -- to help Carole consider why a lesson is worth teaching and better understand the importance of clear and concise directions. Even though I had fundamental questions about her purposes, I knew that I could not start there; this would feel too threatening to Carole. It made sense to begin with her unclear directions. But I lacked a strategy for meeting these 23 goals. With Sharon’s assistance, I developed a plan for a third conference that took place a month after Carole had taught the lesson. Because so much time had passed, I thought we should view the videotape together. Borrowing a strategy I had read about in another graduate course, my plan was to watch a twenty-minute clip then hand Carole the remote control so that during the second viewing, she could stop the tape anytime she noticed something or felt surprised by something she saw. Sharon suggested an alternative procedure. She knew that there was way too much to talk about in such a lengthy video segment, so she proposed that I focus our attention on a much shorter clip. It made sense to both of us that I choose a clip where Carole gave the unclear directions. After watching the clip, Sharon suggested that I ask Carole what she noticed about the directions. If she did not pick up on how confusing they were, I should bring this up directly. Sharon offered me actual language to use, suggesting that I refer to the lesson transcript I had planned to bring along: “Let me tell you something I was struck by. Let’s go to the text and actually look at what you said.” After jointly analyzing the actual words Carole had used, we then could each write a new set of directions for the task since giving clear directions is an important skill for teachers. Again, Sharon offered me concrete language, saying, “Let’s both take a minute to write up directions that are clearer.” Once these were shared, Sharon suggested that I ask Carole what specifically she had learned then share my own feelings about the importance of paying careful attention to the clarity of one’s language when giving directions. Sharon then helped me think about how to open the conversation by establishing a positive tone. Recalling that Carole had commented about how she looked in the video 24 of her lesson, Sharon suggested that I, too, could tell her how worried I was about what the video camera would do to me since I had planned to videotape our conference. Sharon also recalled that Carole had stated how frustrated she was while teaching the lesson. I could demonstrate how concerned I was for Carole and her learning by stating that I had been thinking about what might have caused her fi'ustration which would lead us into viewing the chosen video clip. Armed with such a clear and reasonable plan for the beginning of the conference, I felt confident enough to plan the remainder of the conversation which I hoped would address Carole’s purposes for teaching the lesson. A final successful attempt. After opening the conversation using Sharon’s suggestions, Carole and I watched the video segment where she showed the students a stuffed animal then asked them to describe how “Wrinkles the Dog” made them feel or what they thought of when they saw him. The students offered the following responses: fat, chubby, extraordinary design, cute, careful, cuddly, snugly, nice, fuzzy, Wrinkles, sleep, comfortable, and hairy. When students gave answers that were not adjectives, Carole asked them to either “think of something closer” or “give me another one.” After watching this clip, I asked Carole what she noticed. Immediately Carole articulated why her directions had been problematic. I encouraged this analysis and suggested we look at the transcript of her lesson to locate the directions and the students’ responses. I then suggested that we each write a new set of directions for the Wrinkles activity that were clearer, explaining that giving concise directions is a real skill teachers need to develop. Carole enthusiastically engaged in this activity, writing not only new directions but a scenario for how the children would have responded differently. 25 Later Carole noticed that when a student said that the stuffed animal was “careful,” she replied, “You think he’s careful?” which led Ryan to change his answer. When Carole realized that this response was not helpful, I casually asked Carole, “So what could you have said to him?” In her attempt to answer my question, she covered her mouth with her hand and spoke in much choppier, hesitant and softer tones. It took her three different tries to come up with a response that she was comfortable with -- “Ryan, I hadn’t thought of that. How do you think he’s careful?” During each of these attempts, an interesting pattern emerged where her hand would move to cover her mouth and she would speak more softly and hesitantly. When we looked through the transcript and came across the next strange answer, Carole tried to think of a different response on her own but still struggled. You could actually see her working through the challenge of finding new language to address students’ responses. During our conversation, I had no sense of the enormous challenge that my question presented Carole. While she had quickly recognized the problematic nature of 9“ her replies to the students wrong” answers, this knowledge in and of itself did not provide her with an alternative approach for responding. When I asked, “What could you have said to him?” I was doing more than asking her to think on her feet to offer a different reply. I was really asking her to move away from viewing student responses as only right or wrong and instead to accept their answers as windows into their thinking which she could further probe for understanding. Given this huge shift, it was no wonder she hesitated as she searched for a less evaluative response to the students’ answers. What was happening during the conversation that created space for Carole to willingly risk trying on a different voice and different perspective on what learning 26 entailed? Part of the answer lies in our joint efforts to make sense of and learn from Carole’s teaching. For example, I, too, completed the task of re-writing the directions. I even commented to her while drafting my own, “This is harder than I thought!” which drew a laugh from both of us. In this respect we were on equal footing. I was not her liaison so much as I was a fellow teacher jointly engaged in an authentic teaching task. In addition, as we puzzled about how Carole could have responded differently to her students’ unanticipated answers, I offered my own ideas about different language to use. I believe it was this feeling of success that allowed Carole and me to willingly pursue the conversation when it became much less structured and covered more threatening territory around her purposes. What and how I learned. Carefully analyzing previous conference transcripts and receiving Sharon’s help in planning the final conference positioned me to engage in this joint work with Carole. Being mentored by a more knowledgeable other while in a mentoring role myself supports Gallimore, Tharp and John-Steiner’s (nd) assertion that in order for mentors to assist novices, their own performance must be assisted. In other words, mentors need to be mentored. What I learned through this mentored assistance was intimately connected to how I learned it. The kind of mentoring I received was critical not only to strengthening my mentoring practice but structuring my approach to this dissertation research. Professional community of practice. As a university liaison, I had initially found myself doing the work out of sight of other adults with few chances to engage in sustained conversation with my peers about the work. The graduate course created a professional community where novice teacher educators could come together and talk 27 about our images of good mentoring and how we might act on those images. The course instructor played an instrumental role in making sure that we developed into a professional learning community rather than just a support group where educators swap stories and offer moral support. Rather, she pushed us to engage in “critical colleagueship,” a term Lord (1994) uses to describe an inquiry-oriented, practice-based, self-disclosing form of conversation that creates opportunities for teachers to raise questions about and carefully examine their practice. In class, we were required to expose our practice publicly by making and sharing records of our mentoring efforts so that when jointly analyzing them, we could ground our conversation in the particulars of what was said and done. We were expected to ask hard questions of each other, to support our assertions with evidence from the records of practice, to consider alternative interpretations, and to explore rather than avoid disagreement. We had to learn to separate the person from the practice, to move from a defensive stance to one of openness, important elements of critical colleagueship. Assisted performance. While studying my practice helped me identify patterns in my interactions with Carole, it did not help me create new patterns because I lacked that critical know-how. Thus another important feature of my learning occurred through assisted performance. Vygotsky (1978) first wrote about assisted performance in relation to working in a child’s zone of proximal development where a learner is able to accomplish with a teacher’s help what she could not accomplish alone. In other words, a learner engages in an activity to which she is committed. The teacher or mentor observes what the learner can do on her own, then provides appropriate guidance that helps the 28 learner “to identify the nature of [her] problems and to find solutions that enable [her] to bring the activity to a satisfactory completion” (Wells, 1999, p. 159). Sharon assisted my performance by helping me plan for my final debriefing conference with Carole. Through that authentic joint mentoring work, she helped me recognize that I did not know how to launch the conversation and that exposing my uncertainty was okay. Sharon offered concrete language and strategies I could use to create opportunities for more productive conversation with Carole. For example, she helped me consider how I could use the videotape of Carole’s lesson as a “stimulus for thought, reflection and action” (Denyer, 1997, p. 18). Mining a video and crafting a conversation around it is a practice that teacher educators must develop. Sharon’s advice about how to use the video supported me in beginning to visualize and develop this practice. Inquiry. Finally, this field-based seminar helped me not only to engage in inquiry but to experience firsthand the power and joy of self-study. The process of creating transcripts from my ongoing practice, studying them then considering next steps based on what I was learning about myself, my practice and my intern became a powerful means of strengthening my practice and marked a turning point in my work as a liaison. As I became more adept at helping interns make sense of their teaching and plan for instruction, I began to attend more systematically to the collaborating teachers’ experiences. Over time I realized that a sole focus on guiding the interns did not make sense given the fact that the collaborating teachers were the ones who remained connected to the internship long after each cohort of interns or liaisons had rotated through the program. 29 The Research Questions When I shifted my attention to work more directly with collaborating teachers, I drew on my experience as a learner of mentoring to shape what I did as the mentor teacher developer. In particular, I hoped both to develop a similar kind of professional community where the CTs and I seriously studied mentoring and to assist their performance by jointly engaging in authentic mentoring tasks with them. However, I was unsure how to pull this off this work. Drawing on my newfound commitment to self- study, I deliberately crafted the dissertation as an opportunity to study and learn from my emergent practice. In this sense, the shape of this dissertation parallels the earlier inquiry I conducted into my mentoring practice. My first iteration of a research question focused mainly on my practice: How can a field-based university teacher educator assist a group of collaborating teachers in understanding their role and developing their practice as school-based teacher educators? The original sub-questions broadly centered on the different contexts in which I worked with the CTs (e.g. What did I do to help the CTs individually? What did I do to help them collectively?) Once I began collecting data, the most pressing questions that I brought to the study were ones about how to do the work of mentor teacher development. For example, I wondered how to support the CTs in developing a new professional discourse that focused on their dilemmas and uncertainties about mentoring interns. I knew that I wanted them to study records of mentoring practice, but I did not know what it would take to use them productively. I wanted to individually coach the mentors but was unsure what that coaching would look like or how I could position myself to offer one-on-one assistance. 30 Ultimately I wanted to do more than simply study and strengthen my practice. I was equally interested in investigating whether and how professional development contributes to teacher learning. I wondered what if anything the collaborating teachers learned as a result of our joint work. I brought this burning question to my immediate work with the CTs as well as to data analysis. Thus once the challenges of doing the work were over, I developed research questions that captured both learning the practice of mentor teacher development and learning the practice of mentoring. The following central question framed my inquiry: What core challenges arise and learning outcomes result from my efforts to help collaborating teachers learn in and from mentoring practice? This question considers not only my practice as the mentor developer -- both the challenges I faced and what I learned -- but what the collaborating teachers learned about their role and whether and how they developed their mentoring practice. Once I had refined the central question and had launched my analysis of the data, I clarified the sub- questions, organizing them around two headings: my practice and the collaborating teachers’ learning. My practice: The C Ts ’ learning: 0 What challenges do I face in creating, o What contribution does the analysis framrng and facrlItatIng conversation of records of practice make to the around records of mentorrng practice? development of CTs’ mentoring practice? 0 How can I help the mentors come to o What do mentors need to know and see themselves as teachers 0f be able to do in order to support planning? intems’ planning? 0 Howcan I use aCT’s mentoring o What does a CT learn when I assist practice as a baSIs for her learrung? her performance by jointly engaging in the work of mentoring? 31 Researchers are just beginning to attend to the important role professional developers play in helping classroom teachers construct and enact new practices (e.g. Ball & Cohen, 1999; Thompson & Zeuli, 1999; Stein, Smith & Silver, 1999). A growing body of research has emerged from teacher educators’ more recent attempts to transform classroom teachers’ practice. Rarely, however, do such studies specifically attend to the role that the teacher developers played in supporting teachers’ learning or describe what these developers had to learn in order to offer more complex forms of teacher assistance (Wilson & Ball, 1996). One notable exception, Stein, Smith and Silver’s (1999) case studies of two teacher developers working with a small group of classroom teachers, begins to shed light on the complicated new territories professional developers must enter. The experiences of the subjects in this study suggest that teacher developers must revisit their assumptions about teacher learning as they construct new contexts (i.e. teacher communities) that enable and sustain deeper kinds of learning. Furthermore, they must develop pedagogical strategies that respond to the particular needs, contexts and cultures of given groups of teachers with whom they work. The researchers conclude that if teacher developers are to be successful in helping practitioners make substantive changes in their teaching, the developers themselves need to transform their professional development practice. While their study begins to illuminate the role and practice of the professional developer, it raises a number of questions. How do the experiences of novice teacher educators attempting to construct a professional development practice compare with eXperienced teacher educators who must “unleam” traditional practices? What unique challenges do teacher developers face when helping classroom teachers construct a 32 mentoring practice rather than new teaching practices? These questions deserve serious attention. Few studies address how mentor teachers’ dispositions and capacities can be developed. Much of the existing U.S. literature on mentor teacher development focuses on beginning teacher induction (e.g. Feiman-Nemser & Parker, 1992; Feiman-Nemser, Parker & Zeichner, 1993) rather than preservice teacher education.2 Even less attention has been given to how university teacher educators can address the complex agenda of creating strong clinical settings for novices to learn to teach. Conclusion In this introductory chapter, I framed the problem that this dissertation addresses, namely the need to offer mentor teacher development in order for teacher education innovations such as extended internships to do more than simply lengthen the amount of time prospective teachers spend in school. As F eiman-Nemser (2000) notes, “The real challenge for teacher educators is to see that prospective teachers not only have appropriate and continuing field experiences, but that they learn desirable lessons from them” (p. 17). I then described the challenges that mentor teachers and university teacher educators face in creating educative experiences for novices since they often lack strong models or coaches to assist them. Finally, after describing how my own experiences as a learner of mentoring influenced how I approached my work as a mentor teacher developer, I defined the research questions that frame this inquiry. In the following chapter, I extensively describe the research study, including the setting, participants, and data collected. 1 outline the nature of the interventions I ’ Literature on US. preservice mentor development is sparse, but a growing number of studies have been conducted in England (for example McIntyre, Hagger & Wilkin, 1993; Tom linson, 1995; Edwards & Collison, 1996). 33 designed and how I analyzed the data that grew out of these interventions. In addition, I explain that while my role as mentor teacher developer included helping the mentors develop both their mentoring and teaching practices, I deliberately chose to focus solely on helping them become stronger mentors. l hypothesized that because mentoring is a form of teaching, this “back door approach” of working directly on the practice of mentoring might indirectly help the CTs learn more about the practice of teaching. I re- examine this hypothesis in chapter five. Finally, I describe how I conceptualized and organized the three data chapters. 34 Chapter Two Research Design This study is informed by professional literature on preservice teacher education, school reform, learning to teach, mentoring and professional development. Drawing on an emergent methodological tradition whereby researchers use their own teaching as a site for conducting research, I designed the study so that I could document and analyze my efforts as a field-based teacher educator to assist a group of six collaborating teachers in becoming teachers of teaching. The dissertation is a sort of hybrid, drawing on scholarship of teacher education, action research and self-study. In this chapter, I lay out the general and specific context of the study then describe the participants, particularly my role as both researcher and researched, as well as the nature of the intervention 1 designed. In addition, I describe the data sources and methods for analysis. General Context of the Study Based in part on recommendations from the Holmes Group (1990), the College of Education at Michigan State University developed a five-year teacher certification program. Designed to help preservice teachers integrate theory and practice, the program is intended to foster a democratic commitment to teaching all students, an inquiry-based approach to “teaching for understanding” and a commitment to creating learning communities in classrooms and schools (Team One Collaborating Teacher Handbook, 1997). Students enter the program as juniors, take two years of courses combined with field experiences, then complete a year-long internship with a single mentor teacher. 35 MSU internship. The internship and the program more generally attempt to help prospective teachers blend experience with inquiry and reflection. Interns are expected to develop a principled practice embodying four professional standards: knowing subject matters and how to teach them; working with students; creating and managing a classroom learning community; and working and learning in a school and profession. Meeting these standards requires that interns have opportunities both to prepare for classroom teaching activities and “to actually engage in these activities with support” (Team One Elementary CT Handbook, p. 22). Interns are placed with a single classroom teacher (e.g. collaborating teacher) in small clusters of six to eight per school building. In addition to their ongoing work in classrooms four days a week, interns participate in three professional seminars. A school-based study group creates opportunities for interns to come together as colleagues to talk about and explore issues of practice that arise from their classroom teaching efforts. Led by a university liaison, this seminar is designed to strengthen habits of collegiality, thoughtfulness and reflection. In addition, interns complete two graduate level seminars each semester that focus on increasing interns’ subject matter and pedagogical content knowledge. Collaborating teachers. Ideally, CTs assume major responsibility for guiding, supporting and assessing interns’ learning to teach across the year. They are expected to view their intern as a learner, someone who is learning how to teach rather than simply demonstrating their know-how. Their responsibilities fall into three broad categories: helping interns prepare for teaching; guiding interns’ teaching; and supporting interns’ efforts to reflect on and learning from their own and the CT’s teaching. 36 University liaisons. Liaisons work in a single school building with six to eight interns. Liaisons’ responsibilities fall into two major categories: supporting interns in their efforts to learn to teach; and supporting collaborating teachers in their efforts to mentor interns. Working individually with interns, liaisons help them develop personal learning goals, confer with them and their CTs about their planning and teaching, offer written and verbal feedback, and assess interns more formally at mid-term and end-of- semester conferences. Moreover, liaisons work with a group of interns, helping them become a professional learning community. Toward that end, liaisons plan and convene a weekly study group where interns provide critical support for each other as they explore questions and dilemmas of practice. In addition to supporting and assessing interns, liaisons are encouraged to meet periodically individually and collectively with collaborating teachers, discussing how the CT and liaison can coordinate their efforts to support the intem’s learning as well as the program and their role as school-based teacher educators. Specific Context of the Study Within this general portrait of the internship through Michigan State University’s teacher certification program lies the specific context in which the research was conducted. My liaison work at Sandburg Elementary School1 in central Michigan served as the specific site for this study. Located in a rural community fifteen miles from the university, Sandburg became an Alliance School2 in the fall of 1997 and is currently in its lPseudonym. 2 The teacher certification program is divided into three teams of university and school faculty. Each team develops long-term connections with a small cluster of schools in nearby districts. Schools that agree to become clinical sites for interns are deemed Alliance Schools. 37 fourth year of collaboration with Michigan State. The 400 kindergarten through fifth grade students who attend Sandburg represents a predominantly white, economically and academically diverse population. Many students come from working-class families who live in a nearby mobile home park, and nearly ten percent receive free or reduced lunch with an equal number receiving special education services. During the 1998-99 school year, I, along with the six collaborating teachers working with interns at Sandburg were the primary participants. All six collaborating teachers had worked with an intern the previous year when Sandburg first joined MSU’s internship program. In addition, the building principal, Jeff McDormate, participated in several of the mentor teacher development functions. The six interns placed with the six collaborating teachers were part of the study tangentially since my work with the CTs centered on helping them mentor their intern. In order to help the reader distinguish between the collaborating teachers and their interns, the pseudonyms for the CTs contain two syllables and end in “y” or “ie.” The intems’ pseudonyms consist of single syllables. The following chart lists the six collaborating teachers, the grade they taught in, and the interns with whom they worked. Table l: Collaborating Teacher and Intern Pairs CollaboratinLTeacher Grade Level Intern Shelly Kindergarten Beth Sandy First/ Second Liz Kelly Multi-age Jan Mary Third/Fourth Matt Bonnie Multi-age Lynn figgy Fifth John 38 Shelly worked with Beth in her kindergarten classroom while Peggy, a fifth grade teacher, worked with John. The remaining four CTs team-taught in multi-age classrooms. Sandy and Kelly taught first and second graders and worked with Liz and Jan respectively. Mary and Bonnie team-taught third and fourth graders and worked with Matt and Lynn respectively. All of the collaborating teachers had taught for at least 12 years, most of them at Sandburg. Role of the Researcher A growing number of researchers have conducted studies where their own teaching serves as a site to investigate issues of teaching and learning (e.g. Ball, 1993; Heaton & Lampert, 1993; Rosaen & Roth, 1995). Many of these researchers studied their own teaching in response to curricular reforms that only offered theoretical treatises of what reform-minded teaching in a given school discipline might look like. Missing was an image of the possible from actual classrooms. Such an emic perspective as these irnplementers enacted curricular reforms provided a much-needed understanding of what is involved in developing such a practice. Drawing on this emerging tradition, I used my work as a university liaison in the teacher certification program at Michigan State University to provide an “insider” look at mentor teacher development. My decision to study my own practice was made largely out of necessity. At the time I conducted this inquiry, very few university liaisons were actually addressing mentor teacher development in their respective Alliance Schools, thus my design options were limited. Perhaps more importantly, however, I had developed a commitment to continue studying my practice in ways similar to my experience as a 39 learner of mentoring. Designing a self-study around my efforts to support the collaborating teachers allowed me to learn in and from my practice while simultaneously illuminating the core challenges I faced as a teacher of mentors to a wider scholarly audience. In this sense the study was designed to generate knowledge in two different domains -- local knowledge and public knowledge (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993). Drawing on Brown’s (1992) notion of “design experiment,” I attempted to “engineer innovative environments and simultaneously conduct experimental studies of these innovations” (p. 151). MSU faculty had not yet developed a systematic approach to mentor teacher development. Through my efforts to assist collaborating teachers, I both created the site for and focus of this research in order to examine the challenges field- based university teacher educators face in developing their practice as mentor teacher developers. The Intervention I brought to this work an understanding that mentoring is actually a teaching activity that requires the mentor to know what she wants the intern to learn, who her intern is as a learner of teaching, and how she can use conversation as a tool to facilitate that learning. I also believed that mentor teacher development is a teaching activity as well. As a mentor teacher developer, I had to know something about the practice of mentoring I was trying to help the collaborating teachers learn, who CTs are as learners of mentoring, and how I could create opportunities for them to learn that practice. Becoming a school-based educator meant that the collaborating teachers needed to strengthen both their teaching and their mentoring practices. I deliberately chose to focus solely on helping the CTs develop their mentoring practice for two reasons. First, I 40 lacked credibility as a teacher developer since I had only taught several years and had not studied and developed my classroom teaching practice as I had for my mentoring practice. Perhaps more importantly, however, I hypothesized that because mentoring is a form of teaching, strengthening their capacity to guide and support interns’ learning over time might naturally lead the collaborating teachers to reconsider and reshape the way they supported and assessed children’s learning. I created two contexts in which to help the CTs develop and strengthen their mentoring practice: a collaborating teacher study group and one-on-one assistance. Collaborating teacher study group. Based on my experiences in Sharon’s class, I knew that I wanted to create opportunities for the CTs and me to develop a community of practice where we could construct a new understanding of our role as school-based teacher educators. Toward that end I established a collaborating teacher study group, drinking that if we could learn to engage in practice-centered conversation, we would be able to identify, articulate, examine and potentially revise our assumptions and beliefs about teaching, learning, learning to teach and mentoring. To foster that kind of conversation, I imagined engaging in two related tasks. First, we needed to define what we wanted our interns to know or be able to do at the end of their internship. Part of this task entailed studying MSU’s professional teaching standards that served as the basis for assessing interns’ growth and performance. We had to get beyond what initially were merely words on a page in order to understand more clearly how those standards suggested a curriculum for the interns’ learning. Another approach to this task lay in clarifying what the CTs as veteran teachers already knew about those core aspects of teaching. This entailed helping the collaborating 41 teachers access and articulate their professional knowledge. For example, while they had been planning for instruction for many years, the CTs had never thought to identify specific skills they drew on when planning. Asking them to describe what they actually do when they plan helped us realize the complexity of planning and the many aspects of planning that interns needed to learn. Second, we needed to consider how we could help interns develop specific knowledge, skills and dispositions, in other words study the practice of mentoring. Based on my own powerful experiences as a learner of mentoring, I had become passionately committed to the examination of artifacts of real practice as a tool for mentor teacher development. I believed that collectively studying our actual mentoring efforts would enable us to identify challenges and dilemmas endemic to the work. Lave and Wenger (1991) note that newcomers to a community of practice learn through conversations and stories about problematic cases. Just as interns were invited to come to the intern study group ready to share video clips or narrative accounts of their teaching, I envisioned the same configuration for a collaborating teacher study group. I had hoped that studying our own mentoring practice would help us enter into what Little (1987) calls “joint work” -- thoughtful and enduring interactions that “induce mutual obligation [and] expose the work of each person to the scrutiny of others” 0). 512). My goal was to create that kind of “critical colleagueship” (Lord, 1994) where we publicly disclosed our questions and dilemmas and pushed each other’s thinking while sustaining high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty. Learning how to foster passionate, sustained and self-disclosing conversation within the study group became an ongoing challenge. Initially I had thought that the CTs would not feel comfortable making their 42 own mentoring practice available for our collective scrutiny. Thus I decided to shoulder the burden in the early months by sharing examples from my own work with the interns, believing that collectively examining my mentoring practice would provide much needed “images of the possible.” Once the collaborating teachers had become comfortable studying records of my practice in the study group, I assumed they would be willing to put their own mentoring practice on the table for our joint examination. One-on-one assistance. In addition to creating the CT study group where we could work to develop a shared vision for their role as teachers of teaching, I also wanted to help them develop specific mentoring strategies so that they could acquire and strengthen particular mentoring skills. In the same way that Sharon had assisted my performance by jointly engaging in an authentic mentoring task (e. g. preparing for the debriefing conference), I wanted to work individually with the CTs, providing mentored assistance to support and extend their efforts to guide their intem’s learning. I imagined “coaching” the collaborating teachers in much the same way that Sharon had coached me, helping them prepare to debrief interns’ teaching or sitting in on co-planning sessions, stepping in and out to support the CTs’ efforts. While I was able to create the collaborating teacher study group where we studied records of mentoring practice and to provide one-on-one coaching, what my interventions looked like in practice differed sometimes markedly from my early visions. For example, the CTs never became comfortable or willing to make public their own efforts to mentor their intern during that school year. In terms of working individually With the CTs, I had not anticipated my own struggle to create Opportunities where I could support the collaborating teachers as they worked with their interns. Because I was rarely 43 invited to join co-planning, co-teaching or debriefing sessions in which a CT mentored her intern, I felt reluctant to simply show up and insert myself into their conversations. Yet until I found ways to fold myself into their mentoring work, I could not help them see the need for or benefits from this kind of mentored assistance. I first had to demonstrate that I could be helpful to them when working with their intern. Data Sources In order to document and analyze my practice and the collaborating teachers’ learning in these two settings -- the collaborating teacher study group and one-on-one support -- I collected a wide range of data. The following chart summarizes the data I collected for this study. Each type of data is then described more thoroughly in the following sections. Table 2: Summary of Collected Data Description of Data Quantity Audio Video Field Notes CT Study Group Sessions l3 13 3 13 One-On-One Assistance: Co-observations - Lesson intern taught 7 2 5 - Debriefing with CT 7 5 3 - Conference with intern, CT and me 7 5 5 Co-planning - Assessing intem’s written unit plans 1 l with CT - Debriefing plans with intern, CT and l 1 me - Flaming with 2 l 1 1 intern, CT and me Coaching Mentor 4 4 4 ET Interviews 7 7 1 6 CT study group sessions. During the fall semester, the study group met monthly for a total of four sessions, all of which were audio-taped. In addition, I took notes during the sessions and wrote extensive field notes afterwards. In the spring semester, the study group began meeting twice a month, and when the interns began their lead teaching, we met nearly weekly for the month of March. Of these nine study group sessions, all were audio-taped and three were also video-taped. I also collected written documents related to each study group session including artifacts created before, during and after the study group meetings (e.g. writing the CTs completed in response to specific tasks I had posed, memos that outlined upcoming sessions or summarized key ideas from previous conversations). Individual assistance. One of the formal ways that I assisted the collaborating teachers’ performance was through a process we called “co-observation.”3 During co- observations the CT and I would (a) individually take notes while observing the intern teach; (b) talk together about what we noticed after the observation; (c) prepare for the debriefing conference (e.g. determine the agenda, who would say what and how); and (d) jointly lead the debriefing conference with the intern. In the fall semester, I conducted a co-observation with each intern and CT pair. In the spring semester, I completed a second co-observation of Liz’s teaching with her collaborating teacher, Sandy. — 3 In her work at Averill Elementary School, Sharon Feiman—Nemser coined the phrase “CO-observation.” She brought student teachers together to observe a teacher’s lesson. Afterwards, the novices met with the teacher to discuss what they noticed, to raise Questions and to consider what the teacher might do tomorrow based on what happened t(Kiély. At Sandburg, I asked the CTs to join me in observing their intern teach so that we could support the intem’s capacity to learn in and from her teaching. 45 In addition to helping the mentors analyze their intem’s teaching, prepare for the debriefing session, and lead the debriefing conference, I assisted the CTs’ efforts to help their intern plan for instruction. Specifically, I assessed an intem’s plans with his collaborating teacher, enabling us to develop a shared agenda for the conversation we then held with the intern around his written plans. I also sat in on several co-planning sessions where the collaborating teacher and intern developed the intem’s plans. During these conversations, I often raised questions, made suggestions to both the CT and intern, and offered my own ideas for the plans being developed. Finally, much of my one-on-one assistance came in the form of “behind the scenes” coaching. Several of the CTs sought out opportunities to talk to me about specific concerns they had with their intern’s performance. In addition, they raised concerns during study group sessions. These conversations often involved first clarifying what exactly the intern seemed to be struggling with then developing a plan to address the situation. This entailed offering advice about how to approach the intern, what specific language to use, and what role the CT needed to play in supporting that aspect of the intem’s development. CT Interviews. I held a formal interview with each of the six collaborating teachers near the end of the 1998-99 school year. These interviews focused on their beliefs about good teaching, their mentoring role and what is involved in learning to teach as well as their experiences as learners of mentoring. In addition, at the end of the school year I held a group interview with the six collaborating teachers where I asked for their candid comments and feedback about the work we had done collectively in the study group and through our joint work with their interns. Because my joint mentoring 46 work with Sandy continued the following school year, I interviewed her a second time to determine how her ideas about her mentoring role had changed. In addition to these formal interviews, I talked frequently with individual collaborating teachers about their intern, both through informal conversation and e-mail. These conversations became part of my fieldnotes. Data Analysis Data analysis occurred in two phases -- ongoing analysis during data collection and analysis once data collection was formally collected. The first was much easier than the latter. Given my commitment to use this research study as an opportunity to learn from and improve my liaison practice, analysis occurred throughout the data collection year. I periodically read through my field log entries, making note of what stood out or seemed particularly salient in my ongoing work with the collaborating teachers. In addition, I immediately transcribed a number of the study group sessions then met with Jenny Denyer, a member of my dissertation committee, for support in initially analyzing the discourse. By looking at the actual record of the study group session, we were able to ground our conversations in the particulars of my liaison practice. These conversations with Jenny allowed me to revisit earlier impressions and conclusions I had drawn while facilitating the study group meetings and to think ahead to next steps with the study group in light of what had just happened. These early analytic sessions helped me evaluate my practice as the “researched.” But I was also the researcher. One of the central challenges I faced in playing this dual role lay in understanding the difference between analyzing the data as the researched and the researcher. While motivated to understand the sense I had made of events at the time, 47 I recognized that I had to move beyond those initial reflections-in-action, re-searching the events captured in the data to reflect-on-action, to examine more critically the events in terms of my own and the collaborating teachers’ actions. In keeping with the spirit of qualitative research, I needed to try to understand why events unfolded the way they did rather than simply evaluate my performance or the collaborating teachers’ learning. However, trying to tame the mass of data I had collected proved enormously challenging. My post-data collection analysis occurred in several stages. First, I generally reviewed all of the data, globally looking across it in order to categorize study group and individual coaching sessions into specific categories of activity. For example, we engaged in three main activities during the study group meetings -- clarifying the curriculum for interns’ learning to teach, analyzing records of practice, and discussing difficult situations that individual mentors faced with their intern. Then within a given kind of activity, I first considered what I was up to and why, often returning to my field notes where I had written about my goals for particular sessions. I also analyzed individual study group or one-on-one coaching sessions using a process that Erickson (1986) refers to as “inductive analysis,” segmenting a study group or one-on-one coaching session into chunks that marked different phases of our interaction. Then I looked at each chunk in terms of exchanges between participants, paying attention to moves particular participants made, including who initiated topics of conversation, who responded, how and why. For example, in reading and rereading a study group transcript where we had examined a record of my mentoring practice, I noticed that the content of our talk varied widely. Noticing this pattern led me to develop 48 categories for the different content of our talk. I then coded each participant’s turn, later enabling me to make claims about whether and how we examined the record of practice. During this phase of analysis, I often developed a narrative account of the session, using large chunks of transcript to describe the action. I relied on my strength as a storyteller to develop a descriptive account without necessarily knowing exactly what the event revealed. Bruner (1985) makes the distinction between paradigmatic and narrative modes of knowing. Whereas the former relies on “science” through the use of “good theory, tight analysis, logical proof and empirical discovery grounded by reasoned hypothesis,” (p. 98) narrative modes deal with story, drama and rich historical account. I intuitively felt that these stories were significant. After writing narrative accounts of individual sessions, I looked for exchange patterns within and across study group and individual coaching sessions, examining how our conversations unfolded over time. Keeping in mind the central question of this inquiry -- the core challenges that arose and learning outcomes that resulted from helping the collaborating teachers learn in and from mentoring practice -- I then searched for themes across different data sources including study group transcripts, interview transcripts, my field notes, and transcripts of my coaching sessions with the CTs and their intern. Doing so helped me move beyond simply telling stories to considering the meaning embedded in these tales. At this stage of analysis I had to make difficult decisions about what stories to include in the dissertation. Writing three data chapters meant that I was limited to carving out three stories. I quickly realized that analysis involves deliberately choosing not only what to include but to leave out. For example, developing separate chapters on each of the main activities in the CT study group (e.g. studying records of practice, 49 developing a curriculum for intems’ learning, discussing problematic situations) would preclude me from delving deeply into my one-on-one work with the CTs. Because I was committed to summarizing and analyzing data from both the study group and my individual work, this meant that something had to be left out in terms of the study group data. If I developed a chapter around clarifying a curriculum for intems' learning to teach, should I try to capture all of the work we did around what interns need to learn about planning, teaching, assessment and working with children’s families or should I delve deeply into a single aspect of the curriculum we defined? Might I use a single chapter to compare and contrast what our study group conversations were like when we grounded our conversation in artifacts of practice versus relied on their reported accounts or should I look at just one of those two kinds of conversation? If I devoted a chapter to my one-on-one work and the collaborating teachers’ learning, should I display one CT’s learning over time or compare and contrast all of the CTs’ growth? Should I focus on a CT who made tremendous progress in her understanding of her role and her capacity to mentor or one who did not move her mentoring practice forward in visible ways? In addition to these questions about the focus of each data chapter, I had to grapple with the question of who and what this dissertation was a study of. Was this a study of my practice, my learning, the collaborating teachers' mentoring practice, their learning, or some combination of these different elements? Initially, I was deeply invested in examining my practice and my learning. Over time, however, I began to see that representing and analyzing my practice meant not only studying my pedagogy but considering who my learners were and what I was trying to help them learn. Once I stopped dichotomizing my practice and the CTs' learning, instead considering the 50 relationship between the two given what I was trying to help them learn, I was able to make choices about the focus of each of the three data chapters. I have conceptualized and organized the data chapters (chapters three, four and five) around what educational philosopher David Hawkins refers to as the dynamic relationship between teacher, student and content to be learned -- the three essential elements that lay at the heart of any teaching encounter. In his essay “I, Thou, It” Hawkins (1974) argues that while teachers, like parents, interact with children by showing them love and concern, teachers must do more than simply care about children. They have the added responsibility of helping students learn content, the school curriculum. Teaching occurs, then, when a teacher and student come together to engage with an “it,” the content. As a teacher of mentoring, I had to help my learners, the CTs, gain a deeper understanding of their role as mentors as well as build their capacity to mentor intents. Thus mentoring was the “it,” the content to be learned. Each data chapter foregrounds one specific aspect of that dynamic relationship between me, the collaborating teachers, and the content they were learning while backgrounding the remaining two elements. Chapter Three My practice Chapter Four Chapter Five Curriculum for learning to plan One mentor’s learning Figure 1: Layout of the Data Chapters 51 In the next chapter I focus on the study group as the unit of analysis, specifically the pedagogy of using records of mentoring practice to foster practice-centered, analytic conversation. I focused on this study group activity for several reasons. First, I had read Ball and Cohen's (1999) argument about using artifacts of practice to foster professional learning. While intrigued by their argument and motivated to use records of practice as a mentor developer, I found this practice to be much more difficult to pull off than I had anticipated. Believing that collaborating teachers need opportunities to uncover their taken-for-granted assumptions about teaching, learning, learning to teach and mentoring, I thought that the use of records of practice would create “productive disequilibrium” for the mentors, something we would then work collaboratively to resolve. I use this concept of productive disequilibrium to analyze two sessions I held with the mentor teachers around records of mentoring practice. Furthermore, of the two kinds of conversation we engaged in during study group sessions, I was much more personally invested in those that centered around records of practice than I was conversations where we relied on the CTs' recollected experience. Finally, I chose this focus for the practical reason that I had transcribed most of these study group sessions and thus was ready to analyze them more systematically once the data had been collected. Chapter four centers on one important domain of the content the mentor teachers and I were trying to teach interns -- both what is involved in thoughtful planning and how we could help the novices learn to plan. I first offer a synthesis of the literature on planning, highlighting the different ways that novices and veteran teachers approach the task of planning for instruction. I then chronicle how as a group the mentor teachers and I worked to clarify a curriculum for the novices’ learning to plan and to develop a 52 strategy the CTs could use to help the novices learn to plan. Finally, I analyze what may have made it difficult for the mentor teachers to carry out that mentoring agenda. Chapter five foregrounds one collaborating teacher’s learning to mentor in relation to the individual coaching I offered her as she worked with her intern. After chronicling what this mentor learned about her role as a teacher of teaching and what specific aspects of her mentoring practice she developed, I identify critical elements in her learning to mentor and explore the relationship between “what” and “how” she learned. Finally, I offer a model for mentored learning to mentor. I chose to focus this chapter on Sandy's learning because I was able to show her growth over time since my work with her spanned two years. While I had originally decided to juxtapose Sandy's learning to mentor with Peggy who did not make nearly the kind of strides that Sandy made, I realized that simply telling Sandy's "story" was stretching the limits of what one chapter could do. Thus I dropped my intent to explore what might have accounted for the differences in Sandy’s and Peggy's experiences as learners of mentoring. It is important to note that the mentor development work that I describe and analyze in the following chapters occurred in the context of relationships which affected what and how people learned. For example, Sandy's early experience as a CT whose intern unexpectedly and abruptly quit halfway through the school year left Sandy with many unanswered questions that she wanted to pursue in her continued work as a school- based teacher educator. Thus she may have been more motivated to learn the practice of mentoring and more willing to engage in the intellectually and emotionally demanding task of studying her practice than some of her colleagues were. I have deliberately chosen not to focus on the relational aspects of my work with the collaborating teachers 53 in an effort to "right a balance" because much of the existing mentoring literature focuses on relational issues (e.g. power, trust, affect, etc.). Thus while the dissertation focuses on the curriculum and pedagogy of mentor teacher development, I acknowledge the centrality of the relationships the CTs and I developed and maintained through out joint work on mentoring tasks and emergent problems of practice. Methods for verification. Once I determined the analytic foci for the data chapters and began drafting memos that offered detailed descriptions of particular events and my subsequent analysis, I needed to contend with the question of whether or not my writing was “believable, accurate and right” (Creswell, 1998, p. 193). I wrestled with this question in a number of ways. First, I triangulated the primary data sources to corroborate evidence, drawing from my own field observations and impressions, collaborating teacher interviews, and transcripts of the study group and individual coaching sessions. I also strove for what Lather (1991) calls face validity. Face validity refers to the reaction a participant has when reading the study. The goal is for the participant to react with a ‘yes, of course’ rather than a ‘yes, but’ experience (Cresswell, 1998). In order to verify my interpretations, I conducted a number of member checks (Miles & Huberrnan, 1994). These checks involved soliciting participants’ views on the credibility of the findings by reading drafts of the data chapters, Sandy’s in particular, since of the six CTs her learning and mentoring is featured most prominently. In addition, I attempted to clarify my own biases both as researcher and researched throughout the study. A strategy used to uncover biases is peer review. A peer reviewer serves as a “devil’s advocate” who keeps the researcher honest (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). My dissertation advisor, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, and committee member, 54 Jenny Denyer, played that role for me when I consulted with them around my liaison practice and during data analysis. The purpose of this dissertation is not to offer a “how-to” manual for mentor teacher developers. Rather, I analyze my emergent practice as a field-based university teacher educator, our collective efforts to define one aspect of the curriculum our prospective interns needed to learn, and one collaborating teacher’s efforts to learn to mentor as we jointly engaged in authentic mentoring tasks to support her intern. In the final chapter, I step back from these fine-grained analyses to consider broader implications for teacher education. In addition, I offer a conceptualization of the role and practice of mentor teacher development. 55 Chapter Three The Pedagogy of Using Records of Practice to Foster Analytic Conversation Wanting to develop a shared vision of the collaborating teachers’ role as teachers of teaching, I convened a monthly study group where they could become learners of mentoring. This chapter focuses on my attempts to engage the collaborating teachers in practice-centered discussions based in records of mentoring practice. Knowing how to create, frame and facilitate conversation around records of mentoring practice stretched my ability as a mentor teacher developer and met with mixed results at best. In the following section 1 first consider the value of examining records of practice as well as the necessary conditions that enable participants to engage in such investigations. I then define the central questions of this chapter, describing the specific data sources I used to examine these questions. Finally, I describe my approach to data analysis before presenting two study group sessions where we investigated records of my own mentoring practice. Using Records of Practice Ball and Cohen (1999) argue that classroom teachers need opportunities to learn how to elicit students’ ideas, interpret those ideas in the moment, and use what they learn about children’s drinking to inform their responses to students and situations. In order for classroom teachers to develop new visions and capacities for teaching and learning, they need opportunities to “become serious learners in and around their practice, rather than amassing strategies and activities” (Ball & Cohen, p. 4). The researchers recognize that the frenetic pace of classroom life makes it nearly impossible for teachers to analyze and 56 evaluate their teaching decisions in the moment. Rather than being relegated to learn from their immediate practice in real time, Ball and Cohen argue that a systematic study and analysis of the central activities of teaching can occur through the examination of records of practice, be they of one’s own or another’s teaching. Records of practice refer to videotapes, audiotapes, transcripts from audio and video, and other artifacts that grow out of practice such as student work, teachers’ lesson plans, curricular materials, etc. Records of practice act as a common referent or shared “text” which grounds the conversation in the particulars of practice. Conversation becomes a more effective instructional strategy when it is organized around a common referent (Scribner & Cole, 1981). Lampert and Ball (1998) argue that when participants examine records of practice, they engage in collaborative investigation by observing, analyzing and interpreting actual practice which leads them to discover different and sometimes conflicting meanings and interpretations. Exploring competing interpretations often leads participants to grapple with standards (e. g. what does it mean to know? what is good teaching? what counts as evidence of student understanding? etc.). Wrestling with these standards creates shared values and a common vocabulary as participants work to develop mutual, agreed-upon understandings over time. I believed that mentoring, like teaching, is a professional practice that must be learned in and from practice. Like classroom teachers, mentor teachers must elicit, interpret and respond to their learners’ ideas, strengths and vulnerabilities, in this case interns. And like classroom teachers, mentors must develop their capacity to size up situations from moment to moment and to operate experimentally in response to intems’ thoughts, confusions and questions. To help the collaborating teachers develop both a 57 vision of their role as teachers of teaching and their capacity to support, guide and assess intems’ learning to teach, I turned to the investigation of records of mentoring practice. Developing a professional discourse. Engaging in a collaborative investigation of practice requires participants to enter into a new discourse. This professional talk is characterized by a narrative of inquiry, not answers, a commitment to analyze rather than evaluate, the ability to support assertions with evidence, the disposition to weigh competing interpretations, the willingness to question each other and the desire to develop reasoned professional judgment (Ball & Cohen, 1999). These discourse norms stand in sharp contrast to the current structure of most professional development activities where teachers lack opportunities to engage in meaningful conversation around practice with colleagues (Little, 1990). Moreover, professional norms of politeness, non- interference and isolation create further challenges to exploring differences in order to reach shared understandings. In order to engage in this kind of professional dialogue, particular norms must be present. Trust, respect and concern must be established before participants can endure conflict and persist in the face of disagreement in an effort to reach interpersonal understanding (Burbules, 1993). Furthermore, participants must bring certain dispositions and skills to the conversation. Burbules identifies “communicative virtues” that help participants successfully construct understanding including a willingness to give and receive criticism, tolerance for different points of view, the ability to admit error, and the ability to listen. Listening involves more than passively hearing what someone has to say; it encompasses actively trying to understand both what is being said and why someone said it. 58 I believed that studying records of mentoring practice would help us develop a professional discourse which we needed to study the records. Collectively investigating real-life, contextualized examples of thoughtful mentoring would offer everyone equal access to actual practice, an important criterion that had been missing from informal group conversations I had held with the collaborating teachers the previous year. Records of practice would act as a common reference, grounding our examination in the particulars of mentoring practice. Creating productive disequilibrium. One particularly important criterion of records of practice is that they challenge “extant practices, beliefs, or ideas” (Ball & Cohen, 1999, p. 15). In other words, studying examples of traditional practice may not be helpful in uncovering unexamined assumptions about teaching, learning, and subject matter, or in this case mentoring and learning to teach. Ball and Cohen assert that when participants encounter non-conventional practices that differ markedly from their own, opportunities for developing a new vision of practice are created. In this way, using records of practice creates opportunities for participants to experience productive disequilibrium, an important aspect of the pedagogy of teacher development (Thompson & Zeuli, 1999). When I began this study, I equated productive disequilibrium with encountering some difficulty, ambiguity or question that leads to what Dewey refers to as reflective thought. In his book, How We Think, Dewey (1910) makes the distinction between thought and reflective thought. Whereas the former unconsciously influences our accepted, unexamined beliefs, the latter refers to conscious inquiry into the nature, conditions and bearings of beliefs. Reflective thought, which Dewey defined as the 59 “active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends,” considers the basis and consequences of beliefs which guide action (p. 6). Critical thinking allows us to come to reasoned conclusions so that we do not constantly fall victim to accepting inferences at face value. Dewey believed that reflective thought arises when a learner faces a problem, dilemma or felt difficulty. In other words, the process begins when she encounters ideas or actions that create a sense of productive disequilibrium. By willingly entering into a state of doubt and suspending judgment in order to actively seek and challenge evidence that supports or rejects possible solutions to the problem, over time the learner is able to establish well-reasoned beliefs which guide further thought and action. For Dewey, the only way to avoid uncritical thought and action is to endure the discomfort of not knowing while inquiring into possible solutions to questions. This was the kind of productive disequilibrium I had hoped to create for the collaborating teachers in our study group sessions. By using records of mentoring practice that depicted the mentor assessing, guiding and supporting an intern’s learning in ways that the CTs may not have considered, I had hoped they would become more aware of their unexamined assumptions about learning, teaching, learning to teach, and mentoring. In addition, I hoped to work through moments of dissonance and develop shared beliefs about our role as teachers of teachers. Challenges in Creating, Framing and Facilitating Analysis of Records of Practice I encountered three challenges in using records of practice to foster analytic conversation about mentoring. First, I had to create real-life materials that challenged 60 extant practices and lent themselves to systematic study and analysis. Second, I grappled with how to frame analytic tasks that grew out of the record of mentoring practice. Finally, I had to facilitate our conversations as we engaged in those investigative tasks. Creating records of practice. Since vivid examples of mentoring were nearly non-existent, my first task lay in creating actual records of mentoring practice. At the outset I felt that I had not developed a sufficient level of trust to ask permission to use examples from the collaborating teachers’ own work with their interns as the focus of our joint investigation. Moreover, I believed that because the CTs were just developing a new vision for their role as school-based teacher educators, their mentoring efforts would not depict images of mentoring that challenged their extant practices, beliefs and assumptions. Since I had been able to document and strengthen my work with interns in the past, I believed that created artifacts from my current practice would introduce a different vision of mentoring. Therefore, I put myself in the “hot seat” and documented my mentoring practice with the interns for the study group’s examination and analysis. Framing worthwhile analytic tasks. Creating records of practice was just the first challenge, however. Professional developers must create opportunities for teachers to think deeply about issues and questions central to the practice (Thompson & Zeuli, 1999). “Learners will be more likely to thrive if materials are framed by appropriate and artfully designed tasks” (Ball & Cohen, 1999, p. 26). Simply videotaping a co-planning session or transcribing a debriefing conference did not illuminate how to use them in the study group. Oftentimes an hour-long co-planning session created over 20 pages of transcript. Knowing what parts of a conversation to focus on, why and how were central 61 questions I had to consider. Thus framing worthwhile analytic tasks around carefully chosen materials became a second major challenge. Facilitating our talk. Knowing how to manage conversation around our examination of the records of practice became a third challenge. I did not always know how to use our investigation to help us establish and engage in a substantial professional discourse. While I had hoped that our investigation would create productive disequilibrium that we could then work collectively to resolve, I oftentimes could not identify moments when the CTs felt uncomfortable. The conversations themselves suggest that we were indeed beginning to establish a new kind of professional talk where we grounded our comments in documents of practice, sought to understand rather than solely evaluate, and acted as “critical colleagues” where we raised concerns and questions about our thinking and actions. On the other hand, these professional development opportunities exacted a heavy price for everyone involved. Central Research Question and Data Analysis In investigating the potential of records of practice to help the collaborating teachers begin to develop a new vision of their role as teachers of teaching, I needed to consider both the curriculum and pedagogy of my practice as well as their participation and what that revealed about their development. The following question framed this inquiry: What are the possibilities and limitations of using records of practice to support mentor development? The following two sub-questions center on the issues I faced in using records of practice as an intervention strategy and what, if any, effect this intervention had on the collaborating teachers: 0 What core dilemmas do I face in creating, framing and facilitating conversation around records of mentoring practice? 62 0 What contribution does the analysis of records of practice make to the development of CTs’ mentoring practice? Three of the fourteen study group sessions held during the 1998-99 school year centered on examining records of practice from my ongoing work with the interns in the school building. The data used to address these questions feature two of these three sessions held in the fall semester as well as my field notes from these meetings.1 Each session took place after school and lasted approximately 90 minutes. The sessions are presented chronologically in order to document both new insights I gained about my practice as a mentor teacher developer and changes that occurred in the community of practice we were working to create. While these questions frame the empirical research, they also were ones that I brought to my immediate practice as a liaison. Howl answered these questions in the moment as I struggled to make sense of unfolding and sometimes unanticipated events differed markedly from how I made sense of this inquiry as a researcher returning to the data many months later with a different set of lenses and understandings. Thus in the analysis I first describe my reflection-in-action, sharing my immediate responses to and understandings of the events around the records of practice. I then offer my reflections- on—action developed after more carefully analyzing the data in order to consider both the effect the investigations had in helping the CTs begin to develop a new vision of their role and core dilemmas I faced. ' I do not include the third session held in December for two reasons. First, we ran out of time to finish our investigation of that record, and the CTs seemed uninterested in returning it. Second, it was the only session where participants asked me to turn off the tape recorder as we analyzed the artifact. The record of practice generated strong emotions about a CT who did not participate in the study group. Thus I chose not to include it in the data presented here. 63 Descriptive analysis. The descriptive analysis of each session is organized around the three central challenges I faced in using records of practice to foster analytic conversation: creating, framing and facilitating analytic discussion of records of mentoring practice in the study group. In describing the development of the record of practice, I trace the ideas, context and activities that led me to collect raw materials that I later turned into actual artifacts. I then describe howl framed and introduced the record of practice. Finally, I provide a detailed account of our conversation around the record and my attempts to facilitate that talk. Just as I had to make decisions about what parts of a transcript or video segment to include in any given record of practice, I had to make decisions as a researcher about what parts of the study group sessions to most thickly describe and analyze. I attempt to give the reader an overall sense of the conversation but then zero in on segments that directly address the central research questions. Interpretive analysis. Following the same organization of the descriptive analysis, I then offer an interpretive analysis organized around creating, framing and facilitating our joint investigation of the record of practice. I consider whether my goals for the conversation fit with the analytic tasks I designed, and how my framing of the tasks may have shaped our investigation in particular ways. Analysis of my facilitation includes both the collaborating teachers’ participation and specific pedagogical moves I made in response to their participation during the sessions because my understanding of their experiences in the moment influenced decisions that I made as the group facilitator. I also consider whether the collaborating teachers seemed to have experienced the productive disequilibrium I had set out to create. Facilitating our talk around the artifacts forced me to examine my own taken-for-granted assumptions about the pedagogy of using records of practice. Session One: The Struggle to Develop a Professional Discourse After completing a co-observation with two interns, I developed a record of practice designed to address two questions: (1) What can and does an intern learn through her early observations of a CT? and (2) How can the collaborating teacher support, guide and assess what her intern learns from observation? While clear about what I wanted the collaborating teachers to consider through our investigation of these records of practice, I felt much less certain how to frame and facilitate the new kind of professional talk I had hoped we would engage in. Creating the records of practice. Wanting to know what sense Liz and Jan were making of their observations in a multi-age classroom, I asked the two interns to observe Sandy, Liz’s CT, teach a short calendar activity to the 40 first and second graders. In addition, Jan’s CT, Kelly, and I observed the same lesson. While Liz, Jan and Kelly took notes as they watched Sandy, I videotaped her lesson. Afterwards, I held a debriefing session with Liz and Jan, inviting them to share what they had noticed. Liz, who worked most closely with Sandy, had taken extensive notes describing many of the teacher moves Sandy had made. To my surprise, Jan, who worked more closely with Kelly, explained that she had kept her eye on Kelly who other than stepping in to assist Sandy with several off-tasks students in the back of the whole group had simply taken notes while observing Sandy teach. After the conference, I made copies of the observation notes Liz and Jan had taken and wrote up a summary of our conversation later that day. 65 Before developing records of practice around these events for use in the study group, I first gained Sandy’s permission to focus on her lesson.2 Once secured, I chose to create a written record of Sandy’s lesson rather than show the 10 minute videotape, assuming it would be easier to focus our attention on a written document rather than the video which contained so much “fast action.” After watching the videotape of Sandy’s lesson, I created a three-page written summary of the calendar lesson that included a chronological explanation of what had transpired for both Sandy and the students and dialogue excerpts I had transcribed from the videotape (see Appendix A). Then based on my field notes and the intems’ observation notes, I developed a short one-page written summary of the comments both Jan and Liz had made about Sandy’s lesson during the debriefing session (see Appendix B). I deliberately chose to focus the summary on the intems’ comments rather than on how I structured the conversation or the challenges I faced in facilitating it. This decision was based in part on my desire not to expose my own difficulties but also on my belief at the time that records of practice should document strong rather than emergent practice. My decision to focus on what interns learn from observing their CTs stemmed in part from incidents that had occurred in my first year of work at Sandburg. At about the same time the previous year, one of the collaborating teachers had told her intern that afier observing the CT teach the morning activities several times, the intern should be able to lead the opening activities on her own. After carefully watching the CT lead these activities, the intern tried it herself but became very frustrated when her teaching was not 2 I had already gained written permission from the interns to study my work with them and to share pieces of that work with the CTs. Thus I did not explicitly tell Liz and Jan about using our debriefing conference in the CT study group. 66 nearly as seamless as the CPS. The CT responded by asking the intern to watch her teach it once more before attempting to teach it again herself. The CT’s response to the intem’s inability to pull off the morning activities suggests the CT believed that learning to teach is a matter of imitation. I wanted us to rethink our assumptions about what interns can and should learn through observation as well as how we can gauge what they actually “see.” I was not convinced that interns recognized the reasoned decisions that their CT made in the moment or the intentions, goals and plans guiding their actions. Framing the analytic task. My plan was to have us first gain some practice in “noticing” teaching ourselves by making a list of things that stood out to us about Sandy’s lesson. I assumed that our list of observations would be much more extensive than what the two interns had noticed, particularly Jan since she had not noticed any of the instruction other than Kelly’s management moves. By juxtaposing our own observations with the intems’, I had hoped to create some productive disequilibrium between a potential belief that observing teaching was relatively straight-forward for interns and the notion that interns need guidance when processing observations of their CT’s practice. Once the CTs recognized the challenge of knowing what interns notice as they observe, I hoped they would better understand that part of their role entails deciphering what interns learn through their observations and helping them consider aspects of the collaborating teacher’s practice that initially may have remained invisible. At the outset of the study group session, I explained that because the interns were learning about teaching through observations of their CT’s practice, we needed to assess what they were noticing and use those observations to help them gain a deeper understanding of the complex interactions between teacher and students that occur during 67 any given lesson. I then described the records of practice we would jointly examine to help us get better at assessing what interns are noticing from their observations and how that information might help us as the intems’ teachers. Pat: Sandy allowed me to videotape her during a 15 minute calendar activity that Jan and Liz observed, and then I talked to Liz and Jan afterwards about what we noticed. I thought we could first read a short summary of Sandy’s lesson then think to ourselves what stands out for us here? Take a few minutes to read through the summary. You might jot notes in the margin every time you see something going on that you think would be important for an intern to be thinking about or talking about. (ctsg 9-28-98) Facilitating the talk. After introducing the activity and questions to guide our investigation, no one seemed to have questions or comments, so the CTs and I began to read the summary of Sandy’s lesson I had passed out. No one spoke for nearly a minute. Then Sandy laughed and read aloud from the summary, “Sandy taps their head.” Shelly laughed. Sandy explained, “I thought 1 put a gentle hand on their shoulder.” It was quiet again for another 40 seconds. Peggy then commented, “I didn’t know they sing! I was kind of impressed here.” Silence descended again for 30 seconds until Peggy asked the group whether or not the CTs say the Pledge of Allegiance in their classroom. A brief conversation about flags and the Pledge ensued. Thrown off guard by their comments made while reading the summary of Sandy’s lesson, I quickly became frustrated with the tone we were establishing. Rather than seriously reading the document, they seemed to banter back and forth, feeling comfortable talking off the tops of their heads. I had hoped for a more deliberative tone. Because we were collectively studying an artifact for the first time, I worried that the precedent was already being set to speak one’s mind, to do so while others were reading, to go for the laugh. 68 Engaging in the analytic task. As I tried to determine if everyone had finished reading the lesson summary, Peggy stated, “I forgot what we were looking for.” When I clarified that we were to consider “what stands out for us, things that we would want interns to pay attention to,” Sandy’s team teacher, Kelly, described several important aspects of Sandy’s lesson including the use of a signal to get the students’ attention, Sandy’s level of preparation, theway routines supported her teaching, her step-by-step directions, and her ability to alert the students to what was coming next. Bonnie agreed with several of Kelly’s observations. Veeringfi'om the analytic task. As Kelly continued to share what stood out to her in Sandy’s lesson, Peggy interrupted her to ask a clarifying question about the class agenda. When Peggy highlighted the fact that she, like Sandy, displays a written agenda in the classroom, the conversation turned to the importance of routines and their schedule for specials. While wondering how we had veered from the artifact of practice so quickly, Peggy seemed to connect this talk to what interns might learn about the importance of routines. After Peggy offered a further description of her own class agenda, I made an explicit connection between the general importance of classroom routines and what specific ones I noticed in Sandy’s lesson. Peggy: Maybe the interns need to understand that even though it’s not necessarily an inherent part of this lesson, routine is important for children. And that doesn’t mean that you have to be so rigid that if you’re in the middle of a writing lesson and it’s 1:43, then you’ve got to put that away... Pat: It’s one of the things that I noticed, like as the person would come up to hold the flag for the Pledge, automatically the kids were standing up without you having to say anything. Automatically they would sit down. It had just become so routinized that they could do that. And how that supports Sandy’s teaching. Not to take that for granted. 69 However, my deliberate attempt to answer the discussion question and direct our talk led Peggy to describe an incident where her intern, John, failed to notice that the students toward the back of the room were not attending. Peggy: I wasn’t there but one of the things that I’ve been trying to get John to notice is when he has everyone’s attention. It’s very easy, especially when they’re sitting in rows, to play to the front half of the room. You get good active listening and participation but then you’ve got the back two groups of kids who haven’t a clue... I tell him you can’t teach a child who’s not paying attention. Shelly: Well to piggyback off that, that’s one thing I said to Beth. l was gone Friday. I had a sub. I had talked with the sub, explaining that Beth would be there and for the most part would do most of the activities. We planned it out together. But one thing I had mentioned to Beth is especially in some of the routine activities, take your time. Pose a question then count. These kids need time to process what we’re saying... Peggy seemed to suggest that because she “wasn’t there,” she could not respond or offer her own examples of how routines supported Sandy’s teaching. Shelly then shared a recent event that had occurred when her intern, Beth, had subbed. Shelly knew that interns often feel pressed to get through an activity, so she offered Beth the strategy of counting in order to slow the pace of her lesson down. Sandy responded by stating that much of what accomplished teachers do is so automatic, comes so naturally, that they no longer consciously think about certain moves when teaching. She went on to conjecture that interns probably fail to notice all of those little managerial moves that make such a big difference in their instruction. Sandy: I think for a lot of the interns, they don’t recognize some of the little things you do like the hand on the shoulder or the active listening signal. I think we all do a lot of things without thinking about it. It just comes naturally. We don’t think of it even as teaching and it’s not necessarily things that they would pick up. Her comment generated lots of overlapping speech, most of which centered on the need to make more visible to the interns all of the little things the collaborating teachers do in a given lesson. 70 Moving further away from the analytic task. For the following twenty minutes before introducing the second record of practice that summarized Liz and Jan’s comments about Sandy’s lesson, much of the conversation centered on specific mentoring strategies the collaborating teachers used to help their interns learn in and from teaching. For example, after Peggy watched her intern struggle through one of his first solo teaching experiences, she suggested that when he observed her teach the next day he should “ignore the content of [her] lesson,” instead focusing on specific management moves Peggy makes to keep students involved. I responded by pointing out that focusing the intems’ observations is a great mentoring strategy “for all of us to [use] because they don’t know what to attend to.” Bonnie picked up on this thought, stating that interns “don’t know what they’re looking for” and are unable to “see” the many decisions teachers must make in the moment. I responded by sharing several specific strategies the CTs could use to make these invisible aspects of their teaching more apparent. I suggested that the CTs try to “unpack their teaching beforehand,” alerting their intern to specific moves they planned to make or potential difficulties they anticipated would arise. In addition, the CTs could unpack their teaching in the moment, explaining why they made particular decisions on the spot. Shelly reflected back on her work with her previous year’s intern and shared that she had pushed the intern to become too involved too fast. This year Shelly was trying to provide more opportunities for Beth to learn about what happens in the classroom before taking responsibility for instruction. Shelly: This year I’m really trying to pace it better for Beth. [With my first intern,] I think I wanted the children to accept her as a professional, and maybe we started things t00 quickly... Later she said ‘you make it look so easy; you don’t realize everything that goes into it,’ and I thought yeah, that’s true. Some things become so routine or second-nature. .. 71 When Shelly mentioned that she has asked Beth to record questions about Shelly’s teaching that they can later discuss, Kelly shared that the two interns in her classroom were taking a lot of written notes. Kelly wondered if this was “part of an assignment that they’re working on?” Peggy did not think so “because John’s not taking a lot of notes.” I asked Kelly if she was able to talk to Jan later about what she writes. Kelly: Well, I didn’t know exactly, if that was private. Today when the kids got talking, I just gave them two minutes to talk. Afterwards, I explained to her why I did that. But at least for Jan I don’t hear her asking a lot of questions so I’m just assuming she’s observing. I mean, her focus is on me and she’s writing. We haven’t processed that together. I didn’t know if she wanted to. Peggy: I don’t hear John asking a lot of questions either... When Kelly replied that she had only informally explained her actions to Jan, Peggy shared that her intern, John, does not ask many questions of her. Bonnie then shifted our attention to a recent co-observation I had conducted of Bonnie’s teaching with her intern, Lynn. Bonnie: I wondered if we were supposed to process something with them after you came in the other day. You went out in the hall and then there were things I would have liked to have processed with her and we didn’t take that time. Before I could respond more fully to the purpose and process of the co-observation, a learning opportunity that 1 was trying to use formally for the first time, Peggy returned to an earlier point about her intern not asking questions. After stating again that John does not raise questions, Peggy hypothesized that this may be due to the fact that she often prepares John ahead of time by walking him through her plans. When she veers from her plans, she makes a point of explaining why. Kelly warned that explanation can actually become a pitfall if not used judiciously, suggesting that by “waiting for them to ask,” they can assess what the intern does and does not already know or understand. 72 Checking in with each other. Peggy then raised a question about what classroom responsibilities the interns had assumed at that early point in the school year. After each CT clarified what teaching tasks the interns had assumed, Shelly described a recent incident that had occurred as Shelly supported Beth in preparing to share a book with their kindergartners. Beth was surprised when Shelly asked her to develop questions around a text Beth planned to share with the students, erroneously assuming that Shelly made up questions on the spot. When Shelly explained the importance of crafting questions ahead of time, Peggy seemed to challenge this statement, sharing that “after 14 years in the same grade level,” Peggy was able to improvise while teaching. She then contrasted her experience as a veteran teacher capable of improvisation to John, who seemed unable to think quickly on his feet. Returning to an earlier question. Rather than respond directly to the discussion of intems’ teaching responsibilities and the idea that interns cannot pull off what they as experienced teachers can, I returned to earlier questions Bonnie had raised about co- observations. I explained that part of the co-observation process involves me helping the intern craft a question or two to bring back to the collaborating teacher about her lesson. I also noted that asking such questions might feel intimidating both for the intern and CT. Peggy seemed to pick up on this tension, jokingly stating how difficult it would be for an intern to ask her collaborating teacher if she had a purpose for a lesson. Bonnie explained that Lynn seemed nervous about our joint observation of Bonnie’s lesson. Bonnie had tried to put Lynn at ease, stating that even if things did not go according to plan, Bonnie would think on her feet and try an alternative route. A number of the CTs shared similar anecdotes where they had to think quickly on their feet. 73 Yet another direction. Kelly then shared what she thought was a real strength of the interns -- their “kid watching skills” -- which led Sandy to describe an incident when her intern, Liz, had noticed that a child was walking on tiptoe. When Sandy pressed Liz to contact the child’s parent, Liz seemed unwilling. Sandy: Oh yeah, they picked up things that I just didn’t [notice]... Today Liz mentioned that one of my little ones is walking on tiptoe. I said would you like to give the parent a phone call about that? And it was like oh no! Very good observation but as far as talking to parents about it, that’s intimidating to them. Peggy: John is so quiet. He doesn’t say much about the kids. Rather than moving the conversation back to the record of practice, I asked the group to put themselves in Sandy’s shoes by imagining that their intern seemed reluctant to contact a parent. What could they do in such a situation? While Sandy had simply made the phone call, in hindsight she recognized she could have invited Liz to listen in on the conversation. Sandy: Model. I’m thinking let her listen in on conversations because there really is something to talking to parents. When you’ve got heavy-duty stuff to tell them, you start out by telling them the child’s strengths and then you sort of get into the issue a little bit, back down a little bit and say oh, but she’s such a good fi'iend. Then go in another direction — it is a dance. Pat: Part of our job since we are the teachers of these interns is to figure out a curriculum for them. What do we want them to learn? I think a really important piece is how to communicate with parents. But what are we going to do to get them ready to take that responsibility? After pointing out that Sandy has developed an internal script for communicating with parents that she could share with Liz, I raised the idea that as the intern’s teachers, we needed to clarify what interns need to learn then consider what we needed to do to support their learning. The second analytic task. Fifty-five minutes into our initial discussion of Sandy’s calendar lesson I deliberately brought our attention back to the original record of practice, 74 first summarizing what we had noticed about the lesson before turning our attention to the second record, the intems’ comments about Sandy’s lesson. After reading about Jan and Liz’s observations described in the one-page summary I had passed out, Kelly launched our brief discussion, commenting that Liz’s observations differed from her own in that Liz seemed to pay attention to the lesson more generally whereas Kelly noticed all of the little things Sandy did to make the lesson successful. Sandy shared that the interns’ focus is on the lesson itself, implying that they might not be noticing the interplay between teacher and students. I then pointed out that because Liz had planned to teach calendar time the following week, she may have been concentrating on how Sandy orchestrates this activity in general rather than noticing how Sandy was responsive in the moment. This meant Liz might not understand the improvisational demands of leading calendar time. My question of what we could do to help Liz think about the interplay between preparation and improvisation of this activity was left unanswered. When I attempted to move us back to thinking about what might have remained invisible to Liz, Peggy went on to share that as veteran teachers, they can consider multiple aspects of what is happening and what is to come whereas interns have much more singular perception. Kelly ended our examination of the record of practice by stating that as their teachers, we should remember that interns have trouble widening their focus. As time ran short, I thanked Sandy for allowing us to use her teaching in this context and reiterated that I wanted us “to be able to focus our talk together on what we’re doing with the interns because we can learn a lot from studying what we are attempting.” 75 Analysis of First Session The following interpretative analysis of this initial attempt to analyze records of practice with the collaborating teachers centers on my pedagogy in using records of practice. Specifically, I examine issues related to facilitating our conversation, framing our investigation, and creating the two records we studied. In the following section I first analyze our conversation using the four categories of talk found in the conversation before examining my own contributions to the discussion. I then examine the challenge I faced in knowing how to respond to the CTs’ comments in the moment. Finally, I consider whether or not I was successful in creating productive disequilibrium through our investigation of these records of practice. Facilitating the discussion. In reading and discussing the first record of practice around Sandy’s lesson, our comments fell into several distinct substantive categories. The following table lays out the different categories of talk found in the conversation and the number of turns both the CTs and I took within each category.3 Table 1: Number and Kinds of Turns Taken during First Session Kind of Talk Number of Turns CTs Myself Direct response to inquiry task 7 2 Clarification questions 7 3 Connection to teaching practice 25 0 Connection to intern/mentoringpractice 63 17 3 These categories arose from analyzing the transcript. In coding each turn, some turns contained more than one kind of talk. In such cases, the category that most characterized a turn was counted in that category only. 76 The collaborating teachers took over 100 turns during the conversation, some lasting only a few seconds while some continued for more than a minute. Only 7 of more than 100 turns were directly connected to the question I had posed after we read the summary of Sandy’s lesson (e.g. “What stands out for us, things that we would want the intern to pay attention to or to notice in her teaching?”). By far the largest amount of time and the majority of the CTs’ turns focused on mentoring moves the collaborating teachers have made given what their intern needs to learn. As the CTs described strategies such as articulating their thinking, assigning the intern tasks, offering the intern feedback, and suggesting strategies the intern could employ, they also made explicit their knowledge about teaching. Of the four categories of talk found in the discussion, my comments fell almost exclusively into the “connection to intern/mentoring” category. Unlike the CTs, however, who shared specific examples of how they had mentored their intern, I labeled strategies embedded in the collaborating teachers’ stories, offered suggestions about specific moves they could make to support their intem’s learning, and raised questions to prompt the CTs’ thinking about mentoring. For example, when Sandy shared that Liz felt uncomfortable calling a parent, I asked the group to consider what we might do when faced with this situation (e.g. “It’s a great situation. So you’re the CT... What are our options?”). When Bonnie noted that the interns fail to pick up on the little things they do while teaching, I named several strategies they could use including unpacking their teaching beforehand, inviting the intern to stand next to the CT while teaching, and explaining teaching decisions to the intern on the spot. 77 Responsive to whose agenda? The bulk of my comments demonstrate that I was trying to be responsive to what the CTs shared during the conversation. For example, when Bonnie and Shelly raised concerns about co-observations, I tried to address their questions directly and honestly. At the time, however, my decision to capitalize on what the collaborating teachers brought to the table left me feeling that I was abandoning my own vision and plans for the conversation around the record of practice before us. Responding to the issues they raised only took us farther away from the direct task at hand which was to identify aspects of Sandy’s teaching in order to consider parts of their own practice to make explicit to interns. Following the study group session, I wrote: The CTs didn’t seem invested in looking closely at Sandy’s teaching and what we would want interns to think about. Kelly had lots to say but that’s because she had paid careful attention while Sandy actually taught. How to manage conversation in productive ways while not losing sight of the Sandy vignette? How do I manage the back and forth between the vignette on the table and how it relates to the CTs’ immediate experience? It was so exciting that they were really talking to each other. There were jokes... Everyone seemed relaxed. On the other hand, it didn’t feel very respectful to Sandy not to focus on her teaching because she had graciously offered to let us use it as the artifact for the conversation. (field notes 9/28/98) At the time, I felt ambivalent about the session. While grateful for the conversation’s lively tone, the CTs’ seeming engagement, and their willingness to contribute important anecdotes, I was also overwhelmed by the challenge of sustaining our attention on the records of practice. Because it did not happen on its own, I did not try to force it. Feeling ill prepared to manage the dance between us “zooming in” on the documents themselves and “zooming out” to consider related experiences and issues, I did not attempt to connect their comments to the records under study. In hindsight, I realize that the magnitude of this challenge was due in part to my failure to consider a number of issues when framing the analytic tasks around the records of practice. 78 Framing the analytic tasks. First, I failed to alert the group to the fact that investigating a record of practice calls for a very different kind of conversation than sharing what is on our minds. The former requires sustained attention, a desire to understand “what is going on here,” a willingness to suspend making immediate connections to one’s own circumstances. Such a conversation stands in sharp contrast to more informal gatherings I had held with the CTs where we had “checked in” with each other and exchanged stories of what the interns were doing. I failed to alert the group to the fact that I wanted us to try on a different form of professional talk. I had been so steeped in this kind of conversation myself that I simply assumed the collaborating teachers would value and engage in this form of study in the same way I had. As long as I framed a thoughtful question to guide our collective inquiry, I assumed that our talk would focus on the tasks I had designed. This belief was based in part on my participation in a study group with university and teacher liaisons on campus the previous year. In those meetings, we often carefully examined similar records of mentoring practice. Both university and school liaisons always seemed willing and able to engage in the defined task. The questions the facilitator framed focused our collective examination of the records. We stuck to “close readings” of these texts (e.g. written summaries, video segments) and used the artifacts as evidence to support our conjectures and interpretations. Our conversations rarely if ever veered from questions that facilitators posed. I had anticipated the Sandburg CTs would examine the artifacts of practice I created in much the same way. This did not happen, however. The fact that I also failed to publicly acknowledge that the record involved their colleague’s practice may have been another reason why this did not happen. Asking us to 79 talk directly about Sandy’s teaching represented a departure from strongly held professional norms of privacy, non-interference and politeness. This might explain why only Kelly seemed willing to engage in the analytic task. Unlike Kelly, the other CTs lacked first-hand knowledge of either the particular lesson we were analyzing or Sandy’s teaching more generally. Thus they may have felt uncomfortable investigating this record of practice since that required them to analyze their colleague’s teaching. Creating the records of practice. The fact that so few collaborating teachers actually engaged in the analytic tasks suggests that the written summary of Sandy’s lesson and synopsis of the interns’ observations did not give enough information. Perhaps showing several well-chosen video clips of the lesson would have provided us with a richer artifact to analyze. Kelly stated that she had the benefit of being able to visualize the lesson since she had been there which might account for her analysis of Sandy’s teaching. Peggy, however, stated she “wasn’t there,” suggesting that she may have been uncomfortable discussing a lesson that she had not actually observed. This might help explain her tendency to talk about her own teaching and mentoring rather than directly discuss the two records of practice. Mismatch between goals and activity. In addition to the records lacking sufficient detail, my goals for the session may not have fit with the activity I had designed. I had wanted the collaborating teachers to understand that it is not often clear what interns learn from observing their teaching. I thought that contrasting our own observations of Sandy’s lesson with the intems’ observations would lead us to that insight. However, from the comments they made well before reading what the interns had noticed about the lesson, it seems that several if not all of the CTs had already gained this awareness or 80 were developing it through our discussion. Because they already understood that interns do not “see” all of the moment to moment decisions they as experienced teachers make, the CTs did not experience the productive disequilibrium I had anticipated they would.4 My second goal for the session was to help the CTs realize that part of their role entails assessing what interns learn through their observations and using those observations to further the interns’ learning about teaching. However, I am unsure that the second record of practice featuring Liz and Jan’s observations could have helped us achieve that goal. Because I had deliberately left out any of the mentoring moves 1 made during the debriefing conference with the two interns or my uncertainties about facilitating the conversation, there was little for us to analyze. In hindsight, I realize that our investigation might have been much more productive had I framed it around the challenges involved in helping interns learn from observing experienced teachers. However, I was unwilling to expose my own professional vulnerabilities. Preparing for the meeting, I felt much more confident about how to use the summary of Sandy’s lesson (e.g. give us practice “noticing”) but much less certain what we could make of the fact that one intern had noticed a lot and the other hadn’t even paid attention to the instruction taking place. Had I framed our inquiry as an immediate problem of my mentoring practice, we could have identified goals for the debriefing conference with the two interns before reading their observations then considered how we could have responded to the intems’ comments. ‘ On the whole, the conversation does not overtly reveal many places where the CTs experienced productive disequilibrium. One notable exception is Peggy who seemed uncomfortable after hearing that other interns were raising questions given the fact that her own intern did not. 81 Lacking these insights into my emerging practice at the time, I began to question the advantages and disadvantages to using records of practice directly connected to members of the study group. How would I develop the necessary pedagogical skill to facilitate our discussion around the artifacts in productive ways? This question shaped the way I created learning opportunities in the next study group session. When we met the following month to analyze a second record of practice, I had planned much more deliberately how to structure the conversation around the document. While the conversation looked very different than the first, new tensions arose. Session Two: Success in Developing a Professional Discourse In October, interns concentrate on learning to plan, and CTs are supposed to help model and teach this skill. The expectation that CTs will help “teach” planning stands in sharp contrast to traditional models of student teaching where student teachers are expected to know how to plan and thus cooperating teachers are not expected to offer this kind of intensive, ongoing support. From my previous year’s work at Sandburg, I knew that not every CT had come to see herself as a “teacher of planning.” Even when some of the CTs did recognize they had a role to play, knowing how to support the intems’ planning was an ongoing challenge. I designed the next set of records of mentoring practice to address the pressing goal of helping the CTs assess intems’ plans and develop strategies for strengthening those plans in educative ways. Creating the record of practice. Drawing again on my own mentoring efforts to focus the study group's collective inquiry, I videotaped a co-planning session I held with Sandy's intern, Liz, around her upcoming literacy unit. Liz was an intern who on the surface appeared to be a real star. Exuding compassion for and interest in her students, 82 Liz seemed to have established her "teacher presence" at the outset of her internship. Unlike her peers at this early stage in the school year, Liz rarely struggled with management issues. She also demonstrated an incredible work ethic, unafraid to spend long hours before and after school preparing for the day's activities. Sandy felt that Liz was an exceptional beginning teacher. When Liz shared her plans with Sandy, Sandy often responded with enthusiastic approval. In my own work with Liz, I felt she needed to “get below the surface," to move beyond the accomplished skills she already brought to the situation in order to grapple with some of the complexities of planning for instruction. In my co-planning session with her, I attempted to complicate Liz’s written plans. I hoped that investigating a record of practice around this session would push the collaborating teachers' thinking, Sandy's in particular, about what Liz specifically and the other interns more generally might still need to learn about planning and what the CTs could do to enable that learning. After transcribing the session, I deliberately chose two excerpts, about a page each, which illustrated Liz's struggle to get beyond "neat activities” in order to consider what specifically she wanted the students to learn from her literacy unit on quilting (see Appendix C and D). By making public Liz’s struggle, I hoped we could grapple with questions such as what content was being taught through her unit, what interns need to learn about planning and what Liz specifically still needed to develop in her unit. These transcript segments also depicted specific mentoring strategies that helped Liz pursue several questions that had no easy answers. Following each transcript segment, I listed several questions to guide our inquiry. These questions focused on what we learned about Liz as a planner, what planning skills 83 we would want to help Liz further develop, and mentoring moves I made to support Liz's learning. I did so in response to the last study group session where I had failed to consider the importance of including the guiding questions on the document itself so that the collaborating teachers could refer to them while reading the record. Because Liz had given me written permission at the beginning of the school year to make records of my mentoring practice and share them with the Sandburg CTs, I did not explicitly tell her that the October collaborating teacher study group would focus on our earlier planning session. Nor did I tell Sandy ahead of time that the study group session would center on Liz and my efforts to support her planning. Thus unlike the first record of practice where two of the collaborating teachers were familiar with the content ahead of time, I was the only study group member connected to or familiar with these two documents. I assumed Sandy would experience some discomfort since she had already agreed with Liz that her plans were ready for implementation. I also assumed that because several of the other CTs gave blanket approval to their intem’s written plans, they too might experience disequilibrium. Framing and using the records of practice. To frame the session, I explained that because the interns were in the thick of planning their math and literacy units for guided lead teaching, it made sense for us to consider what is involved in helping interns learn to plan. I explained that we would address this question in two ways. First we would "zoom in" to analyze one specific instance of co-planning. Then we would "zoom out" to consider where each intern was in learning to plan and how the collaborating teachers could support their intern's learning. By explicitly stating the expectation of first investigating the record of practice before shifting our focus to the interns more 84 generally, I had hoped to avoid what had happened in the first study group session where we had abandoned the artifacts of practice. To provide some context for the co-planning session, I explained that Liz had developed a literacy unit around one of her passions, quilting. At the time she and I met to discuss her plans, Liz felt she had finished the unit. After giving an overview of the unit, I explained my goal of pushing Liz to consider the big ideas that she wanted students to learn beyond her metaphor that quilting is a story on fabric. I then suggested that two volunteers read the first transcript excerpt (see Appendix C) aloud while the rest of us read along silently so we could get a better sense of the conversation. Finally, I alerted them to the questions at the end of the segment to keep in mind as they listened to the two volunteers read: 1) What questions and impressions came to mind about Liz and her unit as you read this excerpt? 2) What is one issue or question you would want Liz to follow up on from this piece of the conversation and how might you invite her to do so? 3) What moves did Pat make during this part of the co-planning session and to what effect? Facilitating our discussion. As soon as the volunteers finished reading the excerpt, Peggy addressed the questions posed at the end of the transcript segment without prompting from me. Her initial comment launched our examination of the record of practice as we worked collectively to understand Liz as a planner. Considering Liz as a planner. Several of the CTs noted that Liz seemed unclear about her goals for the unit as well as how she planned to launch the unit. More questions were raised about Liz’s conception of learning and what role she thought fun played in learning. Peggy wondered what the activities Liz had planned would actually 85 teach students. Worthy of note is the role that Sandy played in this early part of the discussion. While the other CTs raised concerns about Liz’s conception of fun and how that related to learning, Sandy seemed more ambivalent, both defending and questioning Liz’s stance. Peggy: Sandy: Peggy: Kelly: Pat: Peggy: Sandy: Peggy: Pat: If you hadn't said anything about fun, I would have because it seems like she was focusing too much on what was fun rather than her goal. I wonder if she was thinking you can learn through play. Sometimes they're learning in spite of us. But the statement that whenever we're having fun, we're learning, yeah, I don’t know about that. I think the word she meant was engaged. And that is a worthy goal, but just to say having fun. I'm glad you picked up on that because I don’t know necessarily that your goal should be the fun part. It sounds like she's struggling with how to hook them in. She wants to grab their attention... I sense that she's struggling with how do you get them started and focused, that hook, so that they want to do more. She knows fun can be a link to learning. That's what I'm seeing here. How do I hook them in? How do I get started with this? I'm interested to know what Liz meant by 'fun works.‘ I was really unclear what her understanding of learning is. I didn't have a sense of what is it she really wants them to learn. Yeah, what the goal and objective is. She mentioned she just didn't want to be standing up there telling them about that. I think that's where the fun got in. She wanted them to be doing, to be a part of it. But what is her goal? I mean, does she want to teach them about quilts? Or is she trying to make a comparison between quilts and stories and let’s look at some stories and how can we take that story and put it into a quilt? What is her academic goal? ...Are the activities going to teach something? You have to know what that goal is. Well, I think that she wanted something to get the attention of the kids. Then she wanted to present what she wanted to teach, the objective, or whatever she wanted to teach them, and then she somehow in all that wanted to bring out what they already knew about the unit. So she was trying to get that as her opening. But she really didn’t know how to express herself. Yeah, I think you’re right. She was really articulate in what she wanted the opening lesson to do, but I was less clear about what the big ideas of the unit itself are that she’s going to draw on to make those decisions. (ctsg, 10-26- 98) 86 Several CTs then shared brief anecdotes about their own intern's similar struggles to plan. I attempted to keep the conversation focused on the record by describing a concept map that Liz had created for the unit. In the center was the word “quilting.” Each line growing out of the center circle connected to a separate activity (e. g. patterns in math, making individual quilt squares in art, developing individual quilt story in writing). For each activity, Liz had listed particular purposes. For example, in the writing circle, students would learn what a dedication page is, a copyright page is, and an “all about the author” page is as they wrote their quilt story. How to help Liz strengthen her plans. After wondering aloud what specifically Liz might want her students to learn about quilting, Kelly suggested she could consult the state curriculum frameworks documents to clarify what content goals might fit with what she had already planned. I then invited us all to think about what else we might do to help Liz take the next step in developing her unit. Mary, Kelly, and Peggy thought Liz should clarify her goals for the unit. Shelly added that these goals should then be aligned with the curriculum. I suggested that we could offer some ideas to Liz about what the students might learn or we could invite her to share her own. Bonnie proposed that Liz focus solely on strengthening the literacy component of her unit. Kelly: I would guide her to the frameworks to look through the social studies and science areas to see what kind of things fit in there maybe. Pat: That might help her figure out a focus, yeah. Are there other. things? Seemed like she’s got this idea of fun. What would we want to have her follow up with in terms of her plan? Mary: What she wants to teach. Kelly: What’s her goal? Peggy: Yeah, what her educational objectives are. 87 Shelly: How does it align itself, fit in with the curriculum? 1 mean, if it doesn’t, then why are you teaching it? Kelly: What are the kids going to get out of it for themselves that they can use? I would want to look at that pretty thoroughly and say we don’t want to spend too much time on something that might not be valuable information for them specifically. Peggy: So maybe quilting is not what needed to be put in that center circle. Quilting was the vehicle to get across story elements or parts of a book or whatever. So quilting is the vehicle that she’s going to use to engage them but that’s not the goal. Considering my moves. Kelly then seemed to move our attention to the final discussion question when she shared that I helped Liz “get to the next step” by asking questions that helped her clarify her thinking. Contrasting this co-planning session with her own conversations with Liz, Sandy explained that she often gets swept up in Liz's enthusiasm so that Sandy offers unquestioning approval. Sandy: You really get through the enthusiasm to know the question to ask whereas I think I get sucked in with the enthusiasm. Oh, she's so excited! Oh, that sounds great! That's wonderful! [laughter] But you really hear what she's saying through that enthusiasm and then say tell me more about that and it's really putting her on the spot and making her stop and slow down and think. So this enthusiasm isn't a runaway train... Both Peggy and Kelly used quotes from the transcript segment to describe pedagogical moves 1 had made including allowing Liz to explain her thinking, listening carefully to her ideas, slowing the conversation down by asking clarifying questions and using Liz's own language to point out discrepancies in her thinking. Peggy: I like the way you brought back what she said. She went on and on. You said like two words. And then you said 'but earlier you said you want the opening to be informational.’ She had shifted focus, and you made her think about whether that was an intentional shift or not... You were really giving her back her words, not saying 'this is my opinion.’ You're saying, 'But this is what you said and what you're saying now doesn't fit.’ It makes her think about her decisions more intentionally... And then you asked her to clarify. 'Can you say more about what you mean?’ Explain it. Not just clarify it for you, but clarify it for herself. Is she clear on what she means by entertain? 88 I shared that I was able to slow the conversation down and use Liz's words only by taking detailed notes during the conversation. The transcript excerpt illustrated the usefulness of creating a written record to guide conversations with interns. Analyzing the second record of practice. We then turned our attention to the second transcript segment chronicling my efforts to help Liz clarify what she knew about the students as writers and what it meant to write a "quilting story." (See Appendix D) Liz had gathered a number of picture books about quilts and quilting. During this part of the conversation, she realized that the quilts in these books represented important family memories. This prompted Liz to clarify that she wanted her students to write about a significant event in their own family. Finally, she and I briefly discussed how telling a story of a family memory through words is different from capturing that memory in a quilt. At the end of this second transcript segment, I listed the following questions: 1) What does Liz seem to be working on during this part of the conversation? 2) What would you want her to do next in terms of continuing to plan her unit and why? 3) What moves did Pat make during this part of the conversation? Considering skills Liz could teach. After reading the second transcript aloud, the CTs continued to "dig in" to this record without my prompting. Our discussion focused on what aspects of literacy Liz might teach as we tried to make sense of her evolving understanding of the content. Originally, Liz wanted to introduce title pages and dedication pages through the students' writing. During the co-planning session, Liz seemed to clarify the kind of writing the students would engage in. Kelly stated, “The way you pulled her to the family conclusion was neat,” explaining that I had helped Liz 89 reach that understanding in the same way we would want Liz “to pull those kids to a meaning.” The CTs then considered what specific skills Liz might teach through this writing activity, identifying a number of possibilities including sequencing story events, retelling an event (in writing, orally, through art), and developing their voice through writing. We made a distinction between developing a story on paper and retelling a family memory through a quilt. We also recognized that depending on what kind of story she wanted the students to generate, Liz would need to focus on helping the students develop different skills. Peggy: Mary: Peggy: Pat: Peggy: Shelly: Peggy: Pat: I'm a little confused how story telling can fit into this because to me story telling is a whole different skill. See I'm thinking of sequencing, what happened first, second, third, fourth in order to get your story told. So we're all reading different things. So one of the things she's working on is clarifying what's the relationship between oral story telling, written story telling, and quilting as telling a story. And maybe she didn’t mean oral story telling. That's the way I took it when I was reading it but that may not be at all what she was [thinking]. See I took it in the broader sense... I see this as a wonderful vehicle for those children who may not have the writing skills but can do it through their drawing, and now you're offering another medium. She needs to be clear which way she's going to lead them... She’s working on clarifying what she means by a quilt telling a story, quilt as a representation of a family memory. That's a big idea. So what is it that makes us want to capture them in a way that's permanent on a quilt to share with others? And how is using a single square to represent as Shelly was saying a memory through art different than story writing? There are different skills in writing the story versus using the quilt to tell the story. I then asked the collaborating teachers to put themselves in Sandy’s shoes and consider what they might do to help Liz continue to develop her unit plan, particularly since Liz felt “like she’s already got this planned.” Sandy agreed. The CTs' ideas echoed 90 their earlier suggestions. Peggy reiterated the importance of helping Liz clarify her learning goals. Kelly raised the issue of assessment, stating that Liz should carefully consider how she would determine what the students had learned from the unit. Sandy responded that she and Liz had already spoken of assessment and that most likely it would be ongoing since the students would construct personal quilts across the school year. Peggy seemed to challenge this stance by stating that the students would in fact have produced a final product, a story that could be evaluated in terms of what the students had learned over the two-week unit. Zooming out. I then deliberately invited the CTs to consider how Liz's situation related to where their own interns were as learners of planning. Rather than discussing the interns as planners, however, the CTs shared a number of anecdotes around the intems' recent teaching efforts. Kelly described how challenging it is to choose one or two firings to discuss with her intern after observing her intern teach. While many possibilities exist, Kelly explained that sharing all of her comments, questions and concerns would overwhelm her intern. Knowing what to focus on and what to leave for another time were questions I suggested we discuss in a future study group session. Analysis of Second Session Unlike the previous study group session where we seemed largely unable to sustain our attention on the actual records of practice, the group seemed deeply involved in analyzing these artifacts. The following analysis considers how particular decisions I made may have resulted in a different kind of professional conversation, one that was heavily grounded in the records of practice. I paid much closer attention to the quality of the records of practice I created for this session. I developed clearer strategies for sharing 91 the co-planning transcripts. And in contrast to the earlier session where I responded to anything the CTs said, I was much more direct when facilitating the conversation which may account for certain features of the CTs’ talk. Creating the records. The quality of the records of practice themselves differed markedly between this session and the first. The earlier documents consisted of "omniscient" summaries of Sandy's lesson and comments the interns made about it. These narratives did not seem to lend themselves to careful analysis. In contrast, the second documents consisted of actual transcript segments from the co-planning session. The transcripts allowed us to consider not only Liz as a planner but me as a mentor, whereas in the first records I did not include anything about my work with the two interns. The artifacts from the second study group session also included guiding questions at the end of the transcript segments, clarifying the intended focus of the discussions. This time I had thought much more carefully about what learning opportunities these records of practice afforded the group. Framing the discussion and sharing the records. In framing our inquiry, I deliberately distinguished between analytic talk about the records of practice and more general talk about related experiences with our interns, stating that we would first “zoom in” on a single instance of planning before “zooming out” to consider all the interns as planners. By clarifying these different yet equally valuable forms of talk and creating separate spaces for each, I attempted to avoid what had happened during the previous session where we did not stick to analyzing the artifacts. Clarifying this structure for our conversation ahead of time made me feel more comfortable helping the group stick to it 92 (e.g. first we would discuss Liz as a planner, then we would consider each Sandburg intern as a learner of planning). Furthermore, in terms of sharing the document with the group, I suggested that two volunteers read the transcript excerpts aloud while the rest of us read along silently so we could get a better sense of the conversation. This "reader's theater" format created a shared experience and brought the co-planning session to life. It also addressed my earlier concern that group members had finished at different times and had spoken while others were trying to read silently. Facilitating the conversation. How I facilitated the conversation differed markedly as well. Like the first study group session, the collaborating teachers’ and my own comments fell into distinct categories as the following table denotes. The collaborating teachers took more than 90 turns during our investigation of the co- planning excerpts while I took nearly twenty. Table 2: Number and Kinds of Turns Taken during Second Session Kind of Talk Number of Turns CTs Myself Direct response to analytic task 69 12 Clarification questions 0 0 Connections to teaching 9 0 Connections to intern/mentoring 14 6 Sticking to the analytic tasks. Clarifying my expectations at the outset positioned ' me to play a more active role in focusing our conversation on the records of practice. Unlike the first session where I made no attempt to connect the collaborating teachers' coriltllents to the actual record of practice, in the second session I deliberately tried to S“It‘lll'larize how the CTs’ comments related to a particular discussion question. Thus the 93 majority of my comments fell into the “direct response to analytic task” category. For example, after several of the CTs shared what specific literacy skills they thought were embedded in the writing task Liz had designed, I stated, “So one of the things it seems she’s working on is clarifying what’s the relationship between oral story telling, written story telling, and quilting as story telling.” Later in the conversation, Peggy stated that Liz needed to know “which way she’s going to lead them” because then she will be better prepared to support the students’ learning. Two of the CTs replied that even with preparation, lessons can take on new directions in the moment depending on how students respond. I interjected at that point, wanting us to remain focused on Liz in particular by saying, “I think one of the things she’s working on is clarifying what she means by a quilt telling a story.” My comment connected to Peggy’s earlier point about Liz being unclear which direction the unit was taking by suggesting that Liz’s big idea of a quilt representing a story could in fact provide a focus for the unit. Aside from refocusing our conversation, another strategy I used to keep the conversation centered on the analytic task at hand was to invite other comments by rephrasing one of the three discussion questions or posing the next question once we had seenlingly exhausted our ideas. For example, when Kelly suggested that Liz consult the Michigan Frameworks documents to clarify her objectives, I responded, "That might help her figure out her focus, yes. Are there other things? What would we want to have Liz follow up on?" Kelly had turned her attention to the question of what we would want Liz to cOntinue working on in her unit. By posing the question to everyone, inviting other suggestions, I had hoped to keep our conversation focused. 94 Direct response to the tasks. These strategies seemed to have paid off. Unlike the first study group session where the fewest number of turns were directly related to the analytic tasks, the overwhelming majority of the CTs’ comments directly responded to the tasks around the records of practice. Nearly 75 percent of their turns explicitly addressed the analytic questions I had included at the end of the co-planning excerpts. These numbers stand in sharp contrast to the first study group session where only 7 percent of our comments directly related to the record of practice. In terms of the content of their comments, the CTs noted that Liz seemed unclear what she wanted students to learn. They grappled with what Liz meant by the statement that learning should be fun. They tried to clarify for themselves what skills were embedded in the activities Liz had developed. In addition, they identified a number of mentoring strategies I had employed (e.g. giving Liz the chance to share her ideas, asking clarifying questions, pointing out contradictions in Liz’s thinking). Finally, they considered what next steps Liz needed to make in order to strengthen her unit. Tentative vs. evaluative language. One of the most striking features in their talk is the tentative language the CTs used when discussing Liz and what she needed to learn. A number of comments began with phrases such as “I think” or “I’m a little confused” or “It sounds like” or “I wonder”. Rather than making evaluative statements, they seriously engaged in the task of trying to understand what Liz said during the co-planning session, what that revealed about Liz as an emergent planner of instruction, and what content was embedded in the unit Liz had designed. For example, Sandy stated, “I wonder if she was thinking you can learn through play.” Peggy replied, “I think the word she meant was engaged.” Kelly added, “It sounds like she’s struggling with how to hook them in.” 95 Later Peggy shared, “I’m a little confused how story telling can fit into this...” and Kelly stated, “I think maybe that’s what I’m seeing here.” Their comments convey tentativeness as the CTs attempted to make sense of the transcript segment, an important feature of analytic talk.5 Unlike their talk about Liz, however, the CTs’ comments about my moves were much more evaluative. For example, Kelly stated, “I think you did a nice job of getting her to the next step.” Later Kelly shared, “The way you pulled her to the family conclusion was neat.” Moreover, Peggy prefaced her comments by saying, “I like the way you brought back what she said.” However, the CTs supported their evaluative assertions by using evidence from the co-planning transcripts. Thus another striking feature of their talk is their explicit reference to the records of practice, another important aspect of the kind of professional discourse I was hoping we would develop. For example, Kelly noted that a specific question I had asked, “what are you thinking?” gave Liz the chance to verbalize and perhaps in the process clarify her ideas. Peggy, too, explicitly referred to what I said to Liz when commenting about my mentoring practice, stating, “She went on and on. You said like two words. And then you said, ‘But earlier you said you want the opening to be informational.’ She had shifted focus, and you made her think about [that].” Creating productive disequilibrium. Creating, framing and facilitating the discussion around the records of practice in the ways described above seemed to create the productive disequilibrium I had hoped for. Sandy in particular seemed to experience L 5 Another interpretation of their tentative language could be that the CTs were not comfortable talking about Sandy’s intern because this violated norms of politeness and non-interference. 96 some discomfort. For one thing, she moved back and forth between defending Liz’s decisions and raising questions about them. For example, in considering Liz’s statement about learning being fun, Sandy first wondered if Liz meant that “you can learn through play” but on the heels of this stated, “But whenever you’re having filn, you’re learning, yeah, I don’t know about that.” This latter comment suggests Sandy was questioning Liz’s thinking. Similarly, when Kelly stated that Liz needed to clarify how she would assess students’ learning, Sandy initially explained that she and Liz had already agreed assessment would be ongoing. When Peggy challenged Sandy to consider that Liz would need to assess a final product the kids would create -- a piece of writing or an actual quilt square -- Sandy acknowledged that Liz would have to assess this product in some way. Further evidence that Sandy experienced productive disequilibrium lay in the fact that she scrutinized her own mentoring practice. In contrasting her actions with what she noticed me doing in the co-planning session, Sandy explained that she gets too caught up in Liz’s enthusiasm which keeps her from asking Liz probing questions. Sandy seemed to recognize that her response to Liz’s ideas -- “oh, that sound great! That’s wonderful” -- does not push Liz’s thinking. And because of the many questions we had raised in the study group session, Sandy seemed to realize that Liz could still develop her unit plans rather than treat them as finished and ready to implement. By the end of this second study group session, my qualms about using records of practice connected to immediate group members had vanished. We had dug into the task of analyzing the records of practice even though I was one of the principle participants. My goal to help Sandy move beyond Liz's surface strengths seemed to have been accomplished. 97 Session Three: Exacting a Price for our Earlier Success Unaware of the extent of Sandy’s feelings of inadequacy during our study group session, I was ill prepared to respond to her means of reducing her discomfort, sharing the substance of our conversation with Liz. After learning several valuable lessons from the experience and sharing them in the study group, I became much more aware of how my taken-for-granted assumptions about interns as learners of teaching and CTs as learners of mentoring had contributed to these unanticipated events. Unforeseen decisions. Sandy had taken copious notes during the meeting which I had interpreted as in indication of how seriously Sandy was re-examining her stance as Liz's mentor. Rather than checking this assumption by asking the CTs to share an insight, new question or strategy they had taken from the conversation, I simply opened the conversation up to a more general discussion of the other interns. Had I taken the time to do so, I might have learned that Sandy left the meeting intending to tell Liz everything we had discussed in hopes of helping Liz "fix" the unit even though we had clarified at the outset how important it was that our study group conversations remain confidential. Perhaps a more experienced mentor teacher developer would have recognized the warning signs. In retrospect they seem obvious -- the detailed notes, her decreased participation the deeper we got into the records of practice. Instead, I sat there thrilled that Sandy was leaving the conversation with so much "food for thought." Later, Sandy shared how "inadequate" she had felt as she listened to us raise more and more concerns about Liz's unit, that she had failed Liz as her mentor. Thus she felt compelled to do whatever she could to help Liz address the concerns we had raised. Specifically, Sandy told Liz that she felt she had not done enough to get Liz ready to 98 teach her literacy unit. Sandy then shared the transcript excerpts with Liz and relayed all of the questions and concerns we had raised about the unit in the study group. The fallout was immense. Liz was not only terribly upset to learn that I had made our co-planning session the focus of the CT study group, but overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Sandy's feedback. Liz was particularly angered by the two excerpts I had shared, feeling that I chose them out of a selfish desire to look good as her mentor at her expense as a novice. She felt betrayed, uncovered and unfairly represented. As I worked to repair my relationship with Liz, Sandy and I worked together to make sense of what had happened. On one hand, Sandy had taken our concerns about Liz's unit as implicit criticisms of her mentoring. I tried to assure Sandy that the questions we raised were not a critical reflection of her; Liz had an entire year to learn about planning. As her mentor, Sandy would need to find ways to help Liz address the vulnerabilities we had identified over time rather than to inundate Liz with concerns in a single session. On the other hand, Sandy felt a strong allegiance to her intern during the study group meeting. Sandy's need to protect Liz from our criticism or at least help her to respond to our concerns led Sandy to feel it was only fair to confide in Liz about the comments we had made. Lessons learned. Once Sandy and I worked through the incident, I wanted to help all the study group members learn from the experience. I had gained several important insights into my emerging pedagogy as a mentor teacher developer using records of practice in the study group that I wanted to make public. Perhaps most importantly, anyone directly or peripherally connected to the record of practice during the time of its discussion must be told ahead of time what the nature of the record is and 99 how I intend to use it. Gaining blanket permission at the beginning of the school year to use my work with Liz in helping the collaborating teachers learn the practice of mentoring was not sufficient. She deserved to know how I had planned to use the materials that grew out of our co-planning session. Moreover, as someone peripherally connected to the record, I also should have alerted Sandy that we were studying records of practice featuring her intern. In subsequent meetings where I developed records of practice around my mentoring, I did just that. In addition, closer attention must be paid to how the collaborating teachers make sense of and experience discussions of records of practice. I had not carefully considered what it might feel like to be Liz's collaborating teacher as we carefully examined the strengths and vulnerabilities of the unit. In subsequent discussions I created space for all of us to share what the analysis of the records meant for our ongoing work with interns. Specifically, I invited each one of us to share something we had learned, some question that remained unanswered, or some new insight we had gained and how that insight might guide our future mentoring. Finally, group norms of confidentiality must be established and maintained. I took for granted that my passing reference to keeping study group conversations to ourselves meant that everyone had a shared understanding of the importance of confidentiality. Without that shared commitment, the interns would not feel comfortable letting us study our efforts to support their learning. I also had not helped us consider how we might act on insights gained from examining records of practice in our subsequent work with interns. In hindsight, it was not surprising that Sandy wanted to revisit Liz's unit plans in light of our conversation. She needed to frame that revisiting in 100 her own terms rather than attribute her concerns to her participation in the CT study group. She also needed to prioritize what feedback was most important to give and what could be left for future conversation. Sharing these lessons. At the next study group session, I described what I had learned about my own practice and our collective work with the hope of reestablishing some group cohesion as we entered this "brave new territory" of mentor teacher development. However, several collaborating teachers voiced serious misgivings. They expressed being aware of Sandy's discomfort during the discussion of Liz's unit at our previous meeting and felt badly that Sandy had experienced feelings of inadequacy. Sandy agreed that she felt like she had let her intern down. Shelly explained she had left the study group session worried that she, too, had not done enough to help her intern plan her guided lead teaching unit. I responded by raising the question, “But, can it be okay that both of you are learning how to support their planning? I mean, why would you know how to do that yet?” (ctsg, 1 1-16-98). Mentors as knowers vs. mentors as learners. While I had succeeded in helping at least two of the collaborating teachers (Sandy and Shelly) experience a sense of needing to do more as mentors, I had not carefully considered whether that discomfort was “productive” or how they might go about reducing it. I thought it was perfectly natural for the CTs to have recognized that they would need to develop particular aspects of their mentoring practice over time. I viewed the CTs (and myself) as learners, believing that once we had developed a shared agenda for what they needed to learn, we would work collaboratively in the study group to address those learning needs. This taken-for-granted assumption about collaborating teachers seeing themselves as learners kept me from 101 understanding how uncomfortable it might feel for them to be cast in such a role, particularly in front of their colleagues. After all, the cultural expectations of teachers is that they be knowers with answers not learners with questions (Britzrnan, 1986). In hindsight, I realize that I was challenging long-established teaching norms by bringing this stance of us all being learners to my work with the CTs. Later in the conversation Kelly suggested that we try studying records of practice not connected to Sandburg Elementary so that we could avoid hard feelings and misunderstandings in the future. While I agreed that there were important advantages to studying documents distanced from our context, I explained that such records of practice were few and far between. I also said that I remained convinced we could take advantage of what we had learned from this incident to create more educative opportunities to learn from our ongoing mentoring work in the future. Interns as colleagues or learners? Sandy countered that the interns would "be nervous if they think we're going to discuss them during these meetings, and rightfully so. I wouldn't want a bunch of people discussing me." (ctsg, 11-16-98) Peggy challenged this stance, stating that the interns are our students, that "we're not trying to be critical in that we're picking on them. We're thinking about them with the goal of helping them improve." My own comments echoed Peggy’s thinking. Pat: When a group of professionals gets together to talk about a child during an IEPC, we would never think about going back and telling that child about the conversation or going to a different child and saying, ‘Hey, you’re great compared to this screwed up kid.’ [laughter] (ctsg, 11-16-98) However, Peggy seemed to be the only collaborating teacher who at least publicly shared this view. The other CTs seemed to believe that the interns were their colleagues, and discussing a colleague without him or her present was unprofessional. Their comments 102 alerted me to another taken-for-granted assumption I had made. I entered the study group believing it was imperative that we discuss our interns because they were our learners and we their teachers. In order to learn how to guide their learning to teach, we had to understand their strengths and vulnerabilities. The dissonance we experienced around discussing individual interns in the study group context did not disappear. A year later Shelly voiced her continued discomfort that we were discussing interns without them being present. She explained: I think there's a sense of trust that I've developed with my intern and I just don't feel comfortable at this point sharing something unless that person were here. If she were here, she could explain and clarify, but I can't... And perhaps I'm readin _r too much into it, but I know I wouldn't appreciate my colleagues sitting around ta ‘ ing [about me], and I think I'm pretty secure in my teaching. But I don't think I'd appreciate it. (ctsg, 12-16-99) Shelly’s comment echoed what Sandy had stated the previous year. Shelly believed that talking about her intern in our study group without the intern being present would jeopardize the trust that Shelly had established with her. She also seemed to suggest that only the intern herself could accurately represent her experience and that trying to do so as her collaborating teacher was impossible. Furthermore, even though she felt secure in her teaching, she would not appreciate her own colleagues discussing her practice if she were not present. I felt largely unsuccessful in helping us reach a shared understanding for collaboratively discussing interns not as our colleagues but as our learners. Even if we gained this understanding, I had failed to help us establish the level of trust needed to disclose sensitive information about them in this context. Shelly explained that her mistrust of the study group arose from our work around Liz's quilting unit the previous year. Like Liz, Shelly felt that I had not been up—front about the context of the 103 co-planning session which had led to hard feelings and misunderstandings. Trying to restore a sense of trust and a commitment to learning from our efforts, misguided or otherwise, became an ongoing challenge that resulted from the fallout of that second study group sessionf’ Discussion In order to engage in critical inquiry, participants must uncover their values, beliefs and assumptions (Dewey, 1910/ l 991). In the case of mentor development, participants would need to address their taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs about teaching, learning, mentoring and learning to teach. Examining records of non- conventional practice enable practitioners to identify and reassess their assumptions (Ball & Cohen, 1999). By grappling with the disjuncture between the way they thought things were and the way they now seem to be given their collective investigation, participants experience and work through productive disequilibrium. Ball and Cohen (1999) imply that disequilibrium is productive when it enables participants to explore differences, to work through disagreements in order to reach mutual understandings. But what actually creates that feeling of psychological discomfort or as Dewey states it, that “felt difficulty”? What role do the artifacts themselves, the social interaction around them, and the mentor developer’s facilitation of the conversation play in leading an individual to experience disequilibrium? In the following discussion I grapple with these questions in order to illuminate several core dilemmas I needed to ‘ Over time we continued to explore this issue of the interns as learners of teaching and the CTs as learners of mentoring. When Sandy gave me permission to use records of mentoring practice from her ongoing work with her intern, Sue, during the 1999-2000 school year, our investigations mirrored the kind of professional conversation we had around Liz’s quilt plans. 104 contend with when developing records of practice, framing intellectual tasks, and facilitating our joint analysis as well as what the CTs gained through our investigations. Developing records of practice. Choices I made in developing artifacts of practice had a direct bearing both on the kind and intensity of discomfort the collaborating teachers experienced. For example, when designing the first records of practice, I had hoped to use the two intems’ sketchy observations of Sandy’s calendar lesson to contradict the CTs’ belief that observing a veteran teacher was a relatively straightforward activity for interns. However, our discussion revealed that the CTs did not hold this belief. Rather, they seemed to understand that the complex interplay between the students’ actions and their responses was difficult for interns to “see.” This incident illuminates the challenge of developing records of practice that target particular assumptions mentors need to consider. If the mentor developer does not know in advance what beliefs and assumptions the mentors bring, she is in a much weaker position to create artifacts that might bring those assumptions to the fore. Strong vs. emergent practice. Connected to the issue of disequilibrium is the question of what kind of practice the artifacts should promote. Should records depict images of strong or emergent mentoring practice? Some researchers have argued that artifacts should challenge extant practices (e.g. Ball & Cohen, 1999). This is why I developed records based on my own rather than the CTs’ mentoring efforts. Using my "accomplished" practice created several unanticipated consequences, however. For one thing, solely studying my efforts to mentor their interns left the collaborating teachers feeling inadequate. Sandy was not the only participant who felt this way. After a subsequent study group meeting where the record of practice focused on my work with 105 Kelly's intern, Kelly stated that she left the meeting feeling she "should have done a whole lot more" to support her intern. (ctsg 12-13-99) Furthermore, the records I had prepared failed to illustrate the process I had gone through to develop particular skills. For example, the CTs noticed in my co-planning session with Liz that I listened more than I spoke, that I used Liz’s own words to help her grapple with contradictions in her thinking, that I raised questions rather than evaluated Liz’s ideas. However, what the CTs never saw were all of the transcripts from earlier work with interns where I had failed to use these strategies, talked over the intern rather than listened, evaluated first rather than trying to understand, and pushed my own agenda instead of being responsive to the intern’s.7 Over time, I really began to puzzle about what Ball and Cohen meant by records needing to “challenge extant practices.” Originally, I interpreted this to mean that the records should depict only exemplary practice. That is why I did not create records that captured the current challenges I still faced in working with interns. For example, I had deliberately left out my questions about how to use Liz and Jan’s observations of Sandy’s lesson as a means of helping them learn about teaching. Much later, I began to develop a more nuanced understanding of what the authors may have meant. I came to believe that while the practices depicted in the records should be striving for the kind of educative mentoring the program had envisioned, this did not preclude the records from demonstrating challenges and dilemmas encountered when trying to enact such practices. Our own vs. someone else ’s practice. In creating records of practice I also needed to grapple with the question of whose practice to study. Should the records present the 106 practice of participants within or outside the immediate school context? My own experiences as a learner of mentoring suggested studying records that grew out of our own efforts created powerful learning opportunities. I also recognized that we constantly asked the interns to examine and analyze their teaching practice both privately and publicly. I felt strongly that as mentors we should model our own willingness to engage in similar investigations of our practice by studying our efforts to mentor our interns. However, my personal commitment to studying records of our own mentoring practice clashed with some of the collaborating teachers' desire to move to more neutral territory, a desire that grew out of the cognitive dissonance they experienced when we examined records connected to each other. The CTs’ concern about using records connected to study group members echoes that of Ball and Cohen (1999) who argue that artifacts be disconnected from those in the community of practice. "Current norms of teacher interaction and discourse do not readily support the kinds of joint consideration of one another's practice that would be helpful" (p. 24). In other words, teachers have had few opportunities to discuss their own and their colleagues’ practice in substantive ways. Learning how to engage in a new professional discourse might be easier if the practice under investigation is disconnected from participants. Framing our investigations. Since I chose to ignore this argument and pushed on with studying artifacts directly connected to group members, I needed to be much more explicit about how our collaborative investigations of these records challenged assumptions we held about our relationship to the interns. 7 In chapter one I describe my efforts to develop these aspects of my mentoring practice 107 Interns as colleagues vs. interns as learners. Unlike records of teaching practice in which most participants would agree that students depicted in the artifacts are learners, records of mentoring practice force participants to examine their assumptions about learning to teach. I had erroneously believed that in the same way students are learners of subject matter, we would all view interns as learners of teaching. Without that shared understanding, the disequilibrium created by using records of practice connected to our interns brought about two very different attempts to reduce our discomfort. I (and perhaps Peggy) saw our interns as learners and wanted to continue strengthening our ability to discuss and analyze our work with them in this collaborative context. The other CTs, however, wanted to reduce the felt difficulty by abandoning the practice of studying our own mentoring efforts altogether, a move that would have left us largely unable to continue examining records of practice since so few existed. In hindsight, I needed to help the group establish a shared commitment to analyze their current mentoring efforts and a shared understanding of the purpose for discussing our interns as learners. Without these dispositions, the risks of studying our own efforts seemed to outweigh the benefits. Disclosing discomfort vs. keeping it to oneself. In addition to fi‘aming our discussions in ways that fostered a shared understanding of the interns as learners, I needed to help the CTs understand the importance of making their discomfort public. In order for disequilibrium to be productive, participants must share their questions, interpretations, concerns, and misgivings so that the group can work together to resolve conflict and reach mutual understandings. Because they did not disclose their discomfort as we investigated the records (e.g. Sandy as Liz’s mentor or the other CTs as Sandy’s * by studying transcripts of my mentoring work. 108 colleague) there was no way to acknowledge or reduce this dissonance publicly. Instead, the collaborating teachers were often left to resolve these conflicts on their own since they did not surface openly during our meetings. Managing the talk. In addition to framing our inquiry in ways that encouraged the CTs to articulate their reactions and ideas to the records, I needed to strengthen my ability to engage the group in trying to make sense of our multiple interpretations together. My own and the CTs’ unwillingness to convey our discomfort coupled with my struggle to “rea ” their reactions weakened my ability to help us make sense of dissonance and to work through it productively. While I developed strategies for making more public what we took from our investigations, 1 still struggled to establish norms where everyone felt comfortable sharing their reactions to the records of practice. Even when I began to learn some of the signs of disequilibrium (e.g. lack of participation, contradictions in their comments, strong emotional response), this knowledge did not help me know how to respond in the moment. Digging in vs. checking in. To further complicate matters, we had not developed a shared desire to study records of practice in the first place. The collaborating teachers valued opportunities to "check in" with one another. For example, when describing whether and how the study group sessions were helpful to her, Sandy stated: I found that time when we could vent and say this is our problem, can you help me solve it, I found that really useful. And I was glad that Pat was willing sometimes to put her agenda aside because she realized how important those issues were to us. Just being able to say ‘This is my problem. Do you have any suggestions?’ So I found that helpful maybe opposed to whatever the agenda had been. (ctsg 3-29-99) Sandy appreciated opportunities to get help solving immediate problems of practice with her colleagues rather than "digging in" to a record of practice. Peggy's comments echoed Sandy's. 109 That's kind of howl see these also, as a place for us to say ‘This isn't working the way I thought it should be’ or ‘This is where my intern's at. Where's your intern coming from? Am I expecting too much? Am I expecting too little?’ Because of that, it's very hard for you to plan an agenda because we've got other things on our mind. It's on this particular intern. (ctsg 3-29-99) Peggy appreciated the chance to hear what the other collaborating teachers were doing to support their intems' learning. She also valued the chance to talk about her particular intern, the challenges he faced and what that meant for her role in supporting him. The collaborating teachers named the tension between their desire to "check in" with each other and my desire to "dig in” to the records of practice. Even though I tried not to dichotomize these needs, I often fell into this trap. Sixteen months passed before we successfully resolved this tension. Kelly had suggested we spend one session discussing immediate problems of practice. At the end of that session we would then identify a key mentoring issue to investigate through a record of practice the following session. While this solution enabled us to study artifacts that addressed emergent problems, it also created enormous challenges for me to gather raw materials, develop actual records, and frame analytic tasks around them in very short periods of time. Learning that and learning how. Ultimately I learned about some of the limits to using records of practice in learning how to mentor interns. In particular, I confronted the classic distinction between propositional knowledge or “knowing that” and procedural knowledge or “knowing how.” At the time the data were collected, my main purpose for creating and using records of practice was to help the collaborating teachers develop a vision for their role as school-based teacher educators. I wanted to help them learn that they had an important role to play in supporting their intern's learning. I believed the records of practice we had studied captured some of the complexities of 110 teaching, learning and mentoring and promoted an image of mentor as someone who actively supported, guided and assessed intems’ learning to teach. Comments the collaborating teachers made after investigating these records of practice suggest that I achieved this goal. For example, a month after examining a third record of practice that focused on my efforts to help a special education intern learn how to plan, Sandy stated I’m just thinking about the deeper questioning. In those tapes, you make it look so easy, yet when I’m sitting with Liz, it’s like I can’t even think of the questions to get her thinking at a deeper level. That’s something I’m working on... Even now I’m ashamed at some of the conversations I’ve had with Liz because I see these deep, meaningful exchanges in the videos, and I don’t even know how to ask those questions. It has me thinking more about my role as teacher of an intern. (ctsg 2-8-99) When Sandy first became a collaborating teacher, she was not fully aware of what her new role entailed. Studying records of mentoring practice helped her understand the importance of getting her intern to think at a “deeper level.” While Sandy was motivated to act on her new understanding, this desire alone was insufficient in knowing what to do in the moment. A month later when I interviewed Sandy, she again referenced the records of practice we had investigated in assessing her struggles as a collaborating teacher. As a CT, I want to get better at what you did so artfully, pulling out the important aspects of the lessons that they're working on. I sort of look at it and say 'Oh! It's wonderful! And the kids were engaged. And you had lots of hands-on activities, and everyone was happy.‘ Whereas when I've seen you in the video tapes and things, you're better at looking at the individual components and saying 'Now, wait a minute. Is this going to really get you to where you want to be?‘ That's something that I know I have to work on. (interview, 3-16-99) Studying my efforts to support the interns enabled Sandy to assess her own practice of universally approving her intem’s plans. Furthermore, she identified aspects of her own mentoring practice she wanted to develop including both assessing interns’ plans and finding ways to help them strengthen those plans. 111 Sandy was not the only CT who shared this sentiment. When asked what was challenging about working with an intern, Bonnie explained that “it’s overwhelming helping them learn how to plan. That’s one of the things that I struggle with” (interview, 2-23-99). And an examination of another record of mentoring practice the following year prompted Kelly to share, “I wish I had the skills to know how to do that, how to get my intern to where she needs to be. And I don't have those skills. We almost need a little script, don't we?” (ctsg, 1-13-00) While the use of records of practice seemed successful in helping the collaborating teachers develop a vision of their role as teachers of teachers, examining records of practice was insufficient in translating that new understanding into actual practice. Their experience as learners of mentoring echoed my own efforts to learn how to mentor novices. I had known what I wanted to help Carole think about in her teaching, but lacked the critical know-how necessary to achieve those goals. It wasn’t until my course instructor stepped in and helped me develop an actual lesson plan for the debriefing conference or in Kelly’s words, “a little script,” that I was able to pursue my agenda for Carole’s learning. When Sharon provided this assistance for me, I had asked her how she knew to pose a particular question to me or to suggest a specific strategy. Her responses to these queries helped me understand that she had developed a sophisticated internal map of possible moves to make given particular goals for an intem’s learning. Sandy’s comments about the records of my mentoring practice making it look “so easy” alerted me to the fact that I had also developed an understanding of what interns need to learn to teach as well as a repertoire of strategies to bring to bear. As a group, we needed to lay 112 out much more explicitly what we expected interns to learn. I believed that once we had mapped out a curriculum for the intems’ learning, we could think harder about how to support and guide them in learning particular aspects of teaching. The following chapter describes and examines what happened in the study group when we shifted our attention to address this agenda. After clarifying what interns need to learn about planning, the collaborating teachers and I grappled with questions of who was responsible for teaching planning and how we could address challenges interns faced as learners of planning. 113 Chapter Four Instructional Planning: Doing It, Learning It, Teaching It Planning is a central task of teaching and a central focus in learning to teach. But what does planning entail? MSU’s professional standards provide a general map of the territory. According to these standards, MSU interns should (a) frame worthwhile purposes; (b) gather, assess and adapt a range of curricular resources; (c) check their own subject matter understanding; ((1) consider what students already know; and (e) decide how to introduce activities, organize and engage students, and guide and assess their learning. These planning standards rest on and reflect a particular vision of good teaching sometimes referred to as teaching for understanding. For example, the term “worthwhile” purposes implies the need to teach content that is central to the discipline and relevant to students’ lives. When deciding how to “engage students,” interns are expected to do more than simply plan activities that keep children busy; rather, they should consider whether and how particular activities enable intellectual growth. My understanding of what interns need to learn as instructional planners was based in part on these standards, and I drew on this map in making decisions about what to focus on and how to assess intems’ planning. My planning sessions with the Sandburg interns often left me wondering what kind of support and guidance they received from their CTs. I often felt like a surrogate collaborating teacher, stepping in to assist the intems’ planning because they did not receive sustained support from their own CT. I wondered whether the CTs saw themselves as teachers of planning or whether they were still expecting the university to 114 teach this central task of teaching. Believing that the CTs were well positioned to teach planning, 1 designed a set of tasks for the study group to help them develop their capacity to support interns in learning to plan. At the time this seemed like a relatively straightforward goal. In hindsight, I realize that I underestimated the complexities of planning and the difficulties of teaching and learning it. Thus my efforts to tackle this complex agenda met with mixed results. What do teachers need to know and be able to do in order to plan for teaching? How is planning best learned? Who should teach it? In this chapter, I consider these questions as they played out in the course of my work at Sandburg. Drawing on selected literature and data from study group interactions, I examine three related conceptual and practical domains -- instructional planning, learning planning, and teaching planning -- in order to illuminate this important arena of teacher learning and further refine our understanding of planning. Planning for Teaching Clark and Peterson (1985) describe planning as both a psychological process and a practical activity, meaning that teachers’ thought processes in visualizing future action shape “the things that teachers do when they say that they are planning” (p. 260). In their review of nearly a dozen studies on teacher planning, the researchers distinguish at least eight different kinds of planning: unit plans; lesson plans; daily, weekly, short-range, long-range, yearly and term planning. Moreover, Clark and Peterson report that planning serves two main functions: (1) it increases teachers’ confidence and sense of security (e.g. to reduce anxiety and find a sense of direction); and (2) it gets teachers ready to teach (e.g. identify and assess curricular materials, consider how to organize students, etc.). Beyond visualizing future action, what does it mean to plan? 115 Instructional planning as a design process. Instructional planning entails bringing together curricular resources for teacher and students’ learning, one’s knowledge of students, context and educational goals, and one’s beliefs about teaching and learning and interacting with them in order to produce a product, a plan to guide instruction. When teachers design instruction, they often confront enduring dilemmas for which there are no easy answers. For example, how can the teacher plan to meet the needs of individual students while also addressing the needs of the group as a whole? How can teachers reconcile their own sense of what knowledge is most worth teaching with what a district or state expects them to “cover?” How can teachers represent complex concepts in ways that students can understand without over-simplifying them? Teachers must juggle competing values, beliefs and ideas as they create a coherent plan for children’s learning. Schon’s notion of “design” captures this pre-active stage of teaching where teachers “put things together” in order to design instruction. As designers, teachers engage in thought experiments where they mentally rehearse possible activities and consequences that may arise from those activities. In this sense, teachers engage in a “reflective conversation with the materials of a situation,” a process whereby they ...put things together and bring new things into being, dealing in the process with many variables and constraints, some initially known and some discovered through designing... Designers juggle variables, reconcile conflicting values, and maneuver around constraints — a process in which, although some design products may be superior to others, there are no unique right answers. (Schon, 1987, p. 42) Through mental play, consideration and scrutiny, teachers construct coherence out of the complex and dilemma-ridden arena of planning for teaching. In other words, they produce instructional plans, representations of their future action. 116 Schon’s notion of design aptly refers not only to planning before teaching but to the interactive stage of teaching when practitioners enact their instructional plans and make new plans on the spot. Thus teaching is both an intellectual activity whereby teachers design instruction and a performative one in which they juggle their intellectual design with present conditions to make decisions about how to teach in the moment. Yinger (1993) captures this relationship between pre-active and interactive teaching, arguing that teaching involves two related aspects of practice: performance and consideration. Performance encompasses “the doing, the enacting, the accomplishment of practical action” whereas consideration refers to “careful thought and attention directed toward past and future performance conducted apart from the immediacy and demands of actual performance” (p. 83). Yinger notes that consideration often occurs when planning before teaching and reflecting after teaching. Performance occurs when implementing one’s plans. This planning-implementation-reflection cycle, based on a rational model associated with Tyler (1949), has dominated normative thinking about instructional planning. First, the practitioner identifies educational purposes based on perceived student needs. Next, she considers what learning activities will help children achieve those goals, choosing the best alternative given her desired goals and outcomes. Once the educational experiences are chosen, the teacher considers how they can be effectively organized. Finally, she develops a means to assess whether her purposes have been attained. This four-step linear model allows teachers to deal with uncertainty by seeking to eliminate it through controlled action. The model, however, falsely separates the interactive processes of consideration and performance (Yinger, 1993). 117 Planning for what kind of teaching? Current reforms recognize the inherently unpredictable, uncertain and messy nature of instruction and rest on a vision of teaching that is simultaneously content-rich while also attending to the needs, interests and capacities of students. Teachers facilitate the construction of knowledge rather than disseminate it. “Teaching for understanding” calls on teachers to pose problems of immediate or emerging relevance to students, structure learning opportunities around core concepts that extend across the curriculum, and to seek out, value and use children’s present conceptions and ideas to help them develop deeper subject matter understanding (McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993). Teachers must be able to draw on their knowledge of students, content and pedagogy when entering into complex, uncertain and unpredictable interactions with a particular group of children around a particular concept given a particular context (Ball & Cohen, 1999). In other words, teaching depends on being able to “make reasoned judgments in the context of action” (Lampert & Ball, 1998, p. 29). In order to acknowledge the essence of good teaching, responsiveness to students’ ideas, Yinger (1993) offers an alternative to the planning-teaching-implementation fi'amework -- preparation, improvisation and contemplation. Unlike Tyler’s model of planning where the goal is to avoid the unpredictable, preparation recognizes that some amount of uncertainty is not only inevitable but also desirable during performance. Preparation, then, involves getting ready, becoming receptive, equipping oneself intellectually. Preparation invites possibility rather than attempting to constrain it. Adopting a stance of preparation rather than planning does not mean that one never considers the future. Rather, consideration is carried out with a stance of responsiveness, not simply the desire strictly to implement. While a teacher can plan what questions to 118 ask, for example, she can never know with certainty what ideas such questions will elicit from students nor how she will respond in the moment in order to probe students’ thinking. Every teacher prepares and plans, implements and improvises, reflects and contemplates. The difference lies in how she defines good teaching. Thus a teacher’s vision of strong practice influences how she approaches the task of designing instruction. Kinds of planning. Team One’s teacher preparation program rests on a particular vision of good teaching in line with contemporary reforms where teachers are responsive in the moment to students’ questions, ideas and confusions, such that teachers can, in Dewey’s words, “call out and direct mental activity” (1904/1965, p. 330). Teacher candidates are encouraged to consider how to elicit students’ thinking when planning. Once elicited while teaching, interns must learn how to attend and respond to students’ ideas in ways that further their understanding. Drawing on this vision of good teaching, I offer a refinement of the descriptive categories of planning Clark and Peterson (1985) introduced, building on their temporal distinctions to underscore the difference between planning a single lesson and planning for learning over time. I also introduce a new distinction based on the sources teachers draw on when planning -- planning from scratch versus planning from prepared materials -- to highlight the role of teachers as curriculum developers.l In conceptualizing this complicated territory, I highlight what a daunting task planning is for experienced teachers to pull off and for novices to begin to learn. Preparing to pull of a specific lesson. In thinking about how to pull off an individual lesson, teachers have to consider both what to teach and how to go about 119 teaching it. Once a teacher has designed activities based on goals for student learning, she must think through a host of issues including how to organize students for instruction based on the learning activities and how much time any given part of the lesson may take. She considers how to launch the lesson in order to grab students’ attention and lay out the agenda for their learning, what key explanations or directions to give, how to wrap up the lesson and how to assess what students may have learned given her purposes. Moreover, she must decide what materials will be needed, how and when they will be distributed. Planning for students ’ learning overtime. Planning requires more than deciding how to pull off individual lessons. Teachers must also plan for students’ learning over time. Zumwalt (1989) suggests that long-term curricular planning involves clarifying educational purposes, developing ways to assess and evaluate student learning, and designing learning experiences. Committed to a view of teacher as curriculum developer, Zumwalt (1989) argues that “teaching is a purposeful activity... [R]esponsible teachers should be able to explain their purposes and defend them” (p. 178). This requires an understanding of what students are expected to know or be able to do by the end of the school year or a given unit of study. Teachers also must identify specific values and dispositions they want to foster in their students (Kemp et a1, 1996). Teachers should consult district and state curriculum fiameworks/benchmarks as well as national subject matter standards to establish a sense of the curricular big picture and to clarify cognitive and affective objectives. In reality, however, teachers may not clearly determine their purposes for ' These distinctions in forms of planning were generated over time in my work with the Team One teacher preparation program. 120 instruction. In their review, Clark and Peterson (1985) note that teachers spent the smallest proportion of their planning time considering objectives. In addition to identifying long-term learning goals, teachers must determine how to assess students’ learning, considering what will count as evidence of student understanding. Teachers may choose from a variety of measures (e. g. paper-and-pencil tests, performance assessments, oral questioning, observation) to design assessments that will reveal what students have learned. Moreover, teachers decide how to help children reach those goals by selecting or designing and then sequencing learning experiences. This process can occur in two different ways: planning from prepared materials and planning from “scratch”. Planning from prepared materials. Textbooks with accompanying teacher’s guides are the dominant source of both classroom content and pedagogy (Doyle, 1992). Since most teachers plan from prepared materials, teachers must become critical consumers of published curricular resources. This requires examining the assumptions curriculum developers have made about the content to be learned, what children know and are able to do, why these activities enable particular kinds of learning, and how activities build on each other over time (McNeil, 1999). In essence, teachers must get inside the heads of the curriculum creators, examining the materials through their eyes in order to understand how the textbook was developed and to assess its strengths and shortcomings. In addition, teachers also must consider the materials through the eyes of their learners, considering potential difficulties their students may encounter. In that way they are in a better position to determine if the materials should be used as is, modified, or rejected all together. 121 Planning fiom scratch. Teachers do not always adapt published curricular materials. They also plan from “scratch,” designing their own scope and sequence of activities around particular goals for student learning. In her framework for professional teaching, Danielson (1996) asserts that this process entails gaining a deep understanding of the content to be taught then transforming that content through instructional design into a well-defined and meaningful series of learning opportunities and exercises that become progressively more complex. In other words, each individual activity is central to building a coherent study. Doing so requires a sophisticated knowledge of students’ intellectual, social, and emotional development as well as their current misconceptions and capacities. It also entails drawing on a variety of teacher and student resources in order to identify defensible instructional goals that can be assessed. When designing assessment measures, Danielson contends that teachers need to develop rubrics or scoring systems to evaluate students’ work. The Sandburg CTs: Designers or Adapters of Curriculum? Where were the Sandburg CTs in relation to these ideas about planning? How did they plan for their own instruction? Based on my observations of their teaching, intems’ descriptions of their joint planning sessions, and study group transcripts where the CTs described their approach to planning, all of the Sandburg CTs both designed individual lessons and prepared for students’ learning over time. Table 1 describes how each CT predominantly designed lessons and units. The upper grade teachers mainly relied on published curricular materials. Peggy used the fifth grade math, social studies, English/language arts and science textbooks extensively. Periodically over her twenty years of teaching she occasionally developed 122 Table l: The Sandburg CTs’ Dominant Mode of Flaming Sandburg CTs Planning from Planning from “scratch” prepared materials _P_e_ggy (5th grade) X Bonnie (yd/4'" grade) X Mary (3"1/4"1 grade) X Sandy (1’72"d grade) X Kelly (1’72"d grade) X Shelly (kindergarten) X her own units. Because the content she taught had remained constant over the years, however, she explained that she taught the same units year after year so that she did not have to plan much anymore (ctsg, 2-22-99). Mary and Bonnie, the team teachers in the third/fourth grade multi-age classroom, used basal readers for the bulk of their reading instruction and the math, social studies, English/ language arts and science textbooks routinely. Bonnie explained that she often did not “plan,” instead relying on her ability to make sense of curriculum guides as she taught from them (interview, 2-23-99). I also often heard Mary and Bonnie tell their interns they did not have to plan lessons that were already written out in the teacher’s guides. Bonnie and Mary rarely designed their own curricular units and told their interns on more than one occasion that this was unnecessary since that would be “reinventing the wheel.” It is unclear what knowledge Bonnie brought to her planning. For example, she explained that the best way to learn the content is to teach it repeatedly. After having taught third grade for a number of years, she felt that she finally knew her subject matter. The primary grade teachers, on the other hand, mainly planned from scratch. Sandy and Kelly deliberately chose not to use the district’s reading, science and social studies curriculrun series. The district did not provide such materials to the kindergarten 123 teachers so Shelly had no choice but to design her own curriculum in science, social studies and language arts. Other than using and adapting the district-wide adopted math series, Shelly, Sandy and Kelly developed their own curricular units based on district grade level guidelines for student learning and their own beliefs about teaching and learning. All three women had played an instrumental role in helping the district develop these guidelines for kindergarten through second graders’ learning. Even though the upper and lower grade teachers differed in their approach to planning, the former relying heavily on published curricular materials and the latter planning from scratch, all six teachers agreed on the importance of being responsive in the moment and willing to veer from their plans when teaching. At first glance their ideas about preparation and improvisation seemed to resonate with Yinger’s. For example, during a study group meeting Peggy stated, “Some of the things I do say up there are on the fly. They just come to me. Some examples I just pull in from my own life or from something I read in the paper, and it isn’t planned. But I can improvise” (ctsg, 9-28-98).' Peggy sees teaching as improvisational because she cannot always plan ahead of time what she will do or say. When Sandy asserted that you must be willing to abandon lessons that are not going well, her colleagues strongly agreed. Sandy: Sometimes you plan a lesson and it’s just not going [well] and you cut your losses, like okay, this is it. Peggy: Might as well put this away! This was way too hard. Kelly: I’m honest with the kids, [saying] this didn’t work because of this, and we learn from that and we use flexibility. Peggy: I think the interns want to follow their plan. Shelly: Like Bonnie said, you’ve got to have Plan B and sometimes you need Plan C. (ctsg, 1-11-99) 124 While the CTs noted the importance of flexibility and improvisation while teaching, their image of being responsive in the moment seemed to have less to do with responding to students’ thinking and more to do with whether or not a lesson “is just not going well.” When Sandy read a draft of this chapter two years after making those comments, she confirmed my sense that the collaborating teachers’ notion of improvisation seemed different than MSU’s vision of good teaching where teachers are responsive to students’ ideas and questions. Sandy wrote, I very much thought in terms of cutting my losses if a lesson ‘wasn’t going well.’ If the kids were getting squirrelly, then it was time to cut my losses, and it was measured in terms of student response to my teaching rather than their responses to my teaching. Now, I find myself listening much more closely to the students’ responses and I think of ways to help them construct meaning through learning activities that speak to their misconceptions. (email, 2-12-01) At the time of the study, Sandy felt improvisation had to do with ending a lesson if the students’ outward behavior suggested they were not engaged. I, on the other hand, believed improvisation had more to do with responding to students’ thinking. These differences would become a source of misunderstanding as I pursued my goal of helping the CTs develop their capacity to teach interns how to plan. Learning to Plan for Teaching The scope of interns’ learning about planning is enormous. Not only must novices develop a conceptual understanding of instructional planning but learn how to carry it out. Doing so requires bringing their knowledge of students and knowledge of content together in making decisions about what to do, how and why. However, novices often lack sufficient knowledge of students, pedagogy and subject matter needed to plan for instruction. Moreover, interns are frequently placed with collaborating teachers who do not see themselves as teachers of planning or know how to make visible this hidden 125 world of teacher thinking. To complicate matters, novices learn to plan in two different contexts: the school and the university. Because university teacher educators and classroom teachers do not always share the same image of good teaching, novices may receive conflicting messages about the kind of teaching they should plan for. Challenges preservice teachers face. When an intern enters her collaborating teacher’s classroom, she brings with her limited knowledge of and experience in planning. As an undergraduate, she most likely gained some experience planning individual lessons or short sequences of lessons for small groups of students but now must plan for an entire class, over time, across subjects. Teacher candidates often face a learning paradox at the outset: they are expected to learn how to plan, yet learning entails doing the very thing they do not yet know how to do. An intern must learn to plan by planning, yet at the outset, she “can neither do it nor recognize it when she sees it” (Schon,1987,p.83) At a minimum, planning requires an understanding of students, pedagogy, and the content to be learned. Understandably, interns lack knowledge of their students including how they learn, what they know and are able to do and what potential difficulties they may encounter around particular subject matter. Equally understandably, interns lack knowledge of pedagogy given their limited experience and practical knowledge. In addition, teacher candidates have an insufficient understanding of the subject matter they are expected to teach. By subject matter understanding I mean not only the basic terms, facts and concepts in a given subject but also how those ideas are organized within a discipline and the rules of evidence and proof that guide inquiry in a discipline (Grossman, Wilson & Shulman, 1989). 126 Traditionally, subject matter knowledge is taught through undergraduate arts and sciences coursework. Research on what teacher candidates learn from their subject matter and liberal arts courses raises questions about whether academic study automatically provides them with the kind of subject matter knowledge needed to design instruction. Preservice teachers entering teacher preparation programs often lack strong subject matter understanding (National Center for Research on Teacher Learning, 1991) which is not deepened as they wander through a variety of survey courses. Most prospective teachers are unable to understand that knowledge gained in general education courses is professional knowledge in the sense that it prepares them intellectually for the tasks of planning and teaching (Goodlad, 1990). It is not surprising, therefore, that teacher candidates often express frustration with required courses in general education which in their eyes only delay entry into teaching. What they lack is an understanding of how such general course work is connected to the task of planning and thus their overriding goal of learning to teach. Because novices have limited or uneven knowledge of students, teaching and subject matter -- knowledge essential to designing instruction -- making decisions about what to teach, how and why becomes an enormous challenge. Novices also have vague, undeveloped images of what planning “looks like.” While they were probably exposed to models of planning through their education courses, this introduction is disconnected from classrooms. Moreover, long before future teachers enter teacher preparation programs, they have spent thousands of hours in elementary and secondary schools watching what teachers do. This long, informal “apprenticeship of observation” (Lortie, 1975) produces taken-for-granted beliefs about teaching and learning which may mislead 127 prospective teachers into thinking that they know more about teaching than they actually do and make it harder to form new ideas and habits of thought and action. While prospective teachers have witnessed many teachers offer instruction, as students they had no understanding of or access to what those teachers did to prepare for teaching. Lacking access to this hidden world of teacher thinking or images of what the planning process looks like, they enter their internships with a limited understanding of what it means to plan. While teacher candidates at MSU receive some university support in learning to plan, much of their learning occurs during the internship where novices can plan particular content for a particular group of students under the guidance of an experienced teacher who has practical knowledge of the context, curriculum and learners. However, many times collaborating teachers do not view themselves as teachers of planning or understand what this entails. This often means that interns continue to lack access to images of teachers’ planning or guided support in developing plans of their own. The Sandburg Interns: Learning to Plan amid Conflicting Messages In addition to facing these challenges in learning to plan, the Sandburg interns grappled with how to make sense of conflicting expectations for the kinds of plans they should develop. The interns often received contradictory messages from the school and university about the role writing should play in their planning. In addition, they often found themselves being asked to plan with contrary images of good teaching in mind. Mixed messages about writing in learning to plan. In many preservice programs, including MSU, teacher candidates are required to develop extensive written plans for a number of reasons. First, designing instruction requires teachers to juggle 128 their knowledge of students, pedagogy, and content along with their beliefs about teaching and learning in order to construct coherent plans. Because novices are often unable to hold all of these pieces simultaneously in their head, writing can be a tool for helping novices think as they plan. As Calkins explains, The powerful thing about working with words is that we are really working with thoughts. Writing allows us to put our thoughts on the page and in our pockets; writing allows us to pull back and ask questions of our thoughts. It is this dynamic of creation and criticism, of pulling in to put thoughts on the page and pulling back to question, wonder, remember more, organize, and rethink that makes writing such a powerful tool for learning. (1986, p. 222) Oftentimes novices are unsure how to plan for students’ learning over time or work through the details of an upcoming lesson. Writing allows them to move forward before they are sure of their purposes or learning activities by creating the chance both to immerse themselves in their thoughts and questions but also in the process to gain some perspective on them (Elbow, 1973). Recording their thinking supports interns in developing and organizing their ideas for teaching. A second purpose for developing written plans centers on developing important habits of mind. Taking the time to write extensive plans as learners of planning can help novices to internalize a set of questions to ask themselves and issues to consider when developing future plans. Finally, written plans help novices communicate their thinking and understanding of planning to others such as collaborating teachers and university field-based teacher educators. Writing enables interns to make visible not only their ideas about how to teach a particular lesson or unit but also their general understanding of what planning entails. By creating a shared text that makes novices’ planning public, SChool-based teacher educators are in a better position to support and assess teacher candidates’ planning efforts. 129 While I repeatedly communicated verbally and in writing that the interns could not teach without first developing and sharing written plans with their CT, not every collaborating teacher saw the value in this expectation. Peggy, for example, felt that the interns had “way too many papers for MSU...When are they going to teach?” (10-24-97). The interns were not writing academic “papers,” however. Rather, they were developing extensive unit plans to guide their instruction during an upcoming period of guided lead teaching. Peggy’s use of the term “papers” suggests that she may not have understood that these requirements were designed to support intems’ teaching. Moreover, the collaborating teachers often ignored the requirement that interns develop written plans, routinely letting them teach without them. For example, at a study group meeting in February, I explicitly asked the CTs to describe their intem’s written plans. Mary explained that “Matt will tell me what he’s going to do. He’ll go over everything verbally [but] he’s not writing anything down” which prompted Peggy to reply, “So he’s planning everything in his head. That’s what John will say to me. ‘I have it all planned out in my head. . . ”’ (ctsg, 2-22-00). Bonnie, too, noted that Lynn did not share written plans with her because “unless it’s required by their instructor at Michigan State, they don’t see a purpose for it.” Bonnie further explained that the previous Friday, Lynn had left without writing what she planned to do for reading instruction. “There wasn’t a single thing written down for reading. I said ‘what happens if you were sick, I was sick, and somebody else had to come in?’ I don’t think they realize that piece of it yet.” Bonnie seemed upset that Lynn hadn’t recorded her plans for reading not because she thought it was important for Lynn’s learning as much as she wanted Lynn to leave guidelines in case a substitute I30 teacher was needed. Kelly shared that while Jan wasn’t expected to write plans “for everything she does during the day,” Jan’s required written plans for an upcoming science unit had not yet been turned in. Only Shelly and Sandy seemed to require their interns to submit plans before teaching routinely. Shelly stated that Beth had to develop written plans for her math, science, literacy and social studies units. In addition, Beth completed daily written plans. Shelly checked to make sure Beth submitted these plans before teaching. Without shared expectations and consistent enforcement, the interns often encountered conflicting expectations about the role writing should play in their learning to plan. On the one hand, their university course instructors and I as their liaison required them to use writing as a tool for their thinking and a means to communicate their plans. Many of their CTs, on the other hand, did not expect interns to put their unit or daily lesson plans in writing. Perhaps the CTs did not see the need for written plans since their own plans often consisted of no more than sketchy details scribbled into 2 x 2 inch squares in their planning book. Moreover, the CTs may not have viewed themselves as teachers of planning, or if they had, perhaps they did not know how to assess and respond to intems’ plans. Mixed messages about what kind of teaching to plan for. In addition to conflicting expectations about whether and how they should plan, the Sandburg interns often received mixed messages about the kind of teaching they should plan for. When working with their university instructors and field supervisors, the interns were encouraged to design lesson and unit plans with an image of teaching for understanding. As part of their graduate coursework, they received university guidance in planning a 131 literacy unit “from scratch” based on district, state and national goals/standards and in adapting a mathematics unit using well-chosen published curricular materials. In addition, the interns were supported in designing a science unit based around one or two “big ideas.” While several of their university course instructors and I encouraged the interns to prepare for this kind of teaching, their collaborating teachers did not always share this vision of practice. Tensions arose as the interns tried to negotiate what to teach and how they should teach it in ways that satisfied both their mentor teacher and university course instructors. For example, when the interns attempted to clarify what content they would teach during a two-week science unit in the second semester, several CTs voiced concerns that the interns were focusing their units too narrowly on a single concept. The teachers felt pressure to “cover so much” that they could not justify having the interns spend two weeks “on one thing.” Bonnie: Lynn picked solar system and Matt picked magnetism. She has been getting resources and things. But now her instructor said ‘What they’re asking you to teach about the solar system is too broad’ which is all the things that we had given her that we have always done. She wants her to just focus in on one thing. Mary: One concept. Bonnie: One concept. That might be all right for that two-week period but you still have to hit on all of these other areas too. I mean, I really can’t see spending two weeks on the phases of the moon. I know there’s a lot of things that go with that but I don’t know that we want her to spend that much time. We have so many things to get done that you can’t take a block of time like that. Shelly: When you look at what we have done with our curriculum in the last five years, and everyone is feeling this right now, is that I am being asked to cover so much that you don’t have two weeks to devote to one concept. (ctsg, 1-18-99) While the interns’ university course instructors expected them to help students develop conceptual understanding, their collaborating teachers felt pressure to cover the 132 curriculum due to district expectations and time constraints. This pressure moved the CTs to expect interns to march through the content in similar ways. Further tension erupted when Peggy’s intern, John, received critical feedback from his university science instructor. The instructor had required the interns to focus their science unit on a specific scientific concept rather than health or nutrition. Peggy, however, had told John he must teach first aid. Peggy: She [course instructor] doesn’t like the idea. She doesn’t think that what I’m having him teach is ‘sciency’ enough. Kelly: Well that’s health. Peggy: It’s health, not science. Kelly: We’re going to have to make some changes too. [referring to her own intern who had initially wanted to teach health] Peggy: I’m not making changes. She has to make changes. Kelly: But in the state [education] department, health really is not listed under scrence. Peggy: But I have already covered everything that the science framework for fifth grade covers. The second half of the year is when we study health. As far as I’m concerned, she’s going to have to make some changes. Shelly: I had to justify this last year and I don’t think I should have to if it’s in our frameworks document. (ctsg, 1-18-99) Kelly seemed to concur with the science instructor’s stance that health is not actually a part of the elementary science curriculum because it “is not listed under science” by the state. Even though Peggy agreed with Kelly, she felt that since she had already “covered” the entire fifth grade science curriculum in the first semester, her intern should not be required to teach something other than what Peggy would normally teach in the second semester. Shelly felt that as a classroom teacher, she should not have to “justify” what she teaches to the university. 133 As our conversation continued and Peggy looked over the science instructor’s course syllabus I had distributed, she asked, “What does this mean? What is reform- minded teaching?” Before I could finish answering, several of the CTs interjected, equating reform-minded teaching with discovery learning. Peggy: Shelly: Peggy: Shelly: Pat: Sandy: Peggy: This is from a long time ago. I remember this where you didn’t give them all the information and they had to find it all on their own. We called it discovery learning. Discovery learning! There it is! And it didn’t work! [laughs] Well, some children didn’t process it. They had a good time in that sand and water, throwing things in, but some just played. It’s based on the idea that kids have ideas about the way the world works. And part of our responsibility is to figure out what those ideas are and then create learning tasks that help them build on what they currently understand so that they can develop deeper understandings of those concepts. What comes to mind is an inservice we had a few years ago where they were saying that kids see the world in a certain way. They come to us with these preconceived notions and it’s really hard to change the sense that they’ve made out of the world. I remember that. I just wondered. I’m hoping John knows what reform- minded teaching means because if he asks me [laughs and does not finish her thought]. (ctsg, 1-18-99) While the science instructor had organized her course around a vision of reform-minded teaching and expected the interns to try to enact it, the collaborating teachers seemed unsure what it meant. While Sandy recounted a past inservice that promoted the idea that children hold onto their preconceived notions, Peggy and Shelly seemed to assume that reform-minded teaching referred to discovery learning, an earlier form of instruction the CTs had tried but later abandoned. Peggy seemed to admit she really did not know what it is when she suggested that she could not be of much help to John. This exchange raises the question of how interns can learn to plan for reform-minded teaching when their mentors may not fully understand what 134 reform-minded teaching means. The Sandburg interns faced real challenges in learning to plan as they negotiated with both university instructors and their mentor teachers what kind of teaching they should plan for since both parties did not always share similar images of good practice. Teaching Planning As novices attempt to plan, collaborating teachers face their own challenges in helping them learn to plan. As experienced teachers, they prepare for instruction differently than novices which means they must teach planning in ways they normally do not engage in. Furthermore, experienced teachers rarely view themselves as curriculum developers so they may feel ill-equipped to help novices learn to develop curricular units. In addition, the tacit nature of their practical knowledge means that teachers often do not know how to make visible the intellectual work they put into planning so that novices have access to the ways they prepare for instruction. Finally, questions exist about who is responsible to teach planning and how they as school-based teacher educators can address this task. Differences in the way veterans and novices plan. Unlike novices, experienced teachers rarely write extensive plans. In her ethnographic study of 12 elementary teachers, McCutcheon (1980) found that teachers only recorded their planning to meet administrators’ demands or create guidelines for substitute teachers. Most teacher planning is done mentally rather than on paper (Morine-Dershimer, 1978). In their study of how elementary teachers assessed published language arts curricular materials, Clark and Yinger (1979) found that they often mentally visualized what a particular lesson or unit might look like in their own classroom by drawing on their knowledge of students, 135 how to organize learning activities and the overall curriculum. Similarly, the forty teachers Morine-Dershimer studied simply recorded a few details that were connected to larger, more comprehensive planning structures called “lesson images.” Because experienced teachers have developed knowledge of pedagogy, students, content and context, they can rely on mental visualization and a few jotted notes in their lesson plan book to prepare them for teaching. Simply recording “Math - pp. 110-112; Questions 3-9” in a lesson plan book serves to jog a veteran teacher’s memory and enables her to tap into knowledge of teaching she did not need to record. While experienced teachers can often “schedule” activities by recording a few sparse details, novices lack well-developed ways of thinking about teaching, students and subject matter. The same notes for math instruction do not trigger bigger ideas about lessons. Novices, then, need to plan much more explicitly when preparing for instruction. Teaching planning requires mentors to plan in ways they normally do not engage in, putting themselves in their intem’s shoes in order to picture how planning looks to them. Do mentor teachers see themselves as curriculum developers? Mentors also face the challenge of helping novices learn to plan for students’ learning over time by creating their own units and by adapting prepared materials. Because teachers are rarely trained in curriculum development or given time to do so (V enezky, 1992) they often rely on/teach from published curricular materials. Even when they have the chance to alter curriculum and instruction in their schools, teachers rarely propose major changes, instead making minor adjustments to existing programs and practices (Smylie, 1994). Since most teachers follow prescribed guidelines about what and how to teach, they are 136 not well-positioned to help novices develop a conceptual understanding of curricular planning and learn how to carry it out. Invisible nature of their planning. Even if experienced teachers thoughtfully plan for students’ learning over time, their practical knowledge is embedded in their action (Leinhardt, 1988) as they draw on their knowledge of students, context, content and pedagogy to develop a mental picture of what a lesson will look like (Clark and Yinger, 1979). Oftentimes unaware of their approach to planning and the intellectual work they put into this task, mentors may not know how to make their planning efforts visible to a novice. Thus interns may lack access to the ways their mentors prepare for instruction. Feiman-Nemser and Beasley (1996) illustrate this point. While planning a wordless picture book activity with her student teacher, the mentor, Kathy Beasley, made sure her student teacher understood the purposes for using the text. After mapping out the components of the lesson, both felt confident that the student teacher was prepared to teach it. The next day, however, Kathy was surprised how her student teacher “read” the story and how disengaged the students were. After teaching the same lesson herself the next day, Kathy realized that she knew a lot about how to present a wordless picture book to children, knowledge she had been unaware of when she had planned with her student teacher the previous day. Because Beasley’s extensive practical knowledge was not readily available to her, she underestimated what she knew about teaching and needed to talk about with her student teacher. The Sandburg CTs: Who is Responsible to Teach Planning and How? 137 Like Beasley, the collaborating teachers did not always succeed in making visible the intellectual work of planning. For example, Kelly worried that the interns did not understand “the amount of time” the CTs put into planning. She explained to her intern that she “work[s] an hour a night at home” even if she stays late after school because “you can’t just come in here and throw this together” (ctsg, 2-22-99). The fact that Kelly plans outside of school explains why her planning may literally remain invisible to her intern. Peggy, on the other hand, designed her current units of study long ago because both the content and delivery of her instruction have not changed in years. Peggy: But we’ve also put in time that we don’t necessarily have to put in every time we teach the unit. Like the human body. I developed this unit 10 years ago. I mean I’ve modified it and added things, but the initial planning, I’m not putting in those hours now... My units of study have not changed drastically since I’ve been teaching fifth grade. Language arts is where I have the most freedom, but science and social studies are the same topics that I’ve been teaching forever. Kelly: You put the time into them at some point. But he’s not seeing that. (ctsg, 2- 2299) Since unit planning is no longer an authentic activity for Peggy, it is unclear how her intern, John, can learn how to plan for students’ learning over time. Such a question, however, assumes that Peggy should in fact teach planning to her intern. In reality, we had not reached a shared understanding of who is responsible to teach planning. Recognizing differences in the way the CTs and interns plan. Over time the Sandburg CTs became more aware that the way they plan as experienced teachers is an insufficient form of preparation for interns. For example, Peggy remarked that when they themselves were prospective and beginning teachers, writing “hundreds of lesson plans” enabled them over time to do that kind preparation in their head rather than on paper. Peggy: Do you know how many hundreds of lesson plans we had to write? 138 Shelly: We had to script everything. Peggy: But do you see what I mean? That gave us the background. And later, then you get to where you can do the planning in your head because you have done so many written plans... I guess that’s a problem, too. I’m probably not modeling it enough because so much of it comes out of my head. (ctsg, 2-22-99) Peggy recognized that because she no longer needs to plan on paper, she has not demonstrated the intellectual work of planning for her intern since so much of it occurs “in her head.” Furthermore, Bonnie noted that after teaming with Mary for six years, the two of them often plan in only a few minutes, something interns are unable to do. Bonnie: Mary and I talk about things, and in two or three sentences we fill in each other’s endings to our sentence and we’ve got the lesson planned and we’re gone. That’s really hard for somebody who is new. Sandy: [to Kelly] That sounds familiar. Bonnie: It’s like you say two or three words and we know what we mean. (ctsg, 2- 22-99) Bonnie’s comment about her ability to plan quickly with Mary resonated with Sandy, who team teaches with Kelly. As veteran teachers, they recognized not only can they anticipate what their team teacher is thinking, but that their few words convey quite a bit of meaning about what they plan to do during a given lesson. Bonnie noted that novices would struggle to understand this “short hand” form of planning. Peggy later described an incident where she had designed a science lesson that her intern, John, was expected to teach while she was out of the classroom. After he taught this lesson, Peggy taught the same lesson to a different fifth grade class with much different results which prompted to her to think about why. Peggy: I tried to tell John some of the things to anticipate. I asked him over and over ‘Are you set? Do you know what you’re going to do?’ I walked in [the next day] and said ‘How did it go?’ He said it was chaos. Yet when I 139 did it with Tanya’s class following the same general guidelines -- now maybe I hadn’t been specific enough. I said to him later on, ‘Did you notice a difference?’ and he said ‘Yeah, they were really under control.’ So I think that he thought he’d planned it out in his head. But nothing had gotten written down. And I think he thinks he can teach from my lesson plans... But my plans aren’t detailed enough for him. Pat: As a novice, he cannot pull off what you can in a few notes to yourself. Peggy: So maybe I should have written them more detailed to give to him. (ctsg, 1-18-99) As Peggy recounted what had happened, she seemed to realize that the plans she leaves for herself lacked sufficient detail for her intern and that in the future she should be more explicit if she wants John to teach from her own written plans. Who should teach planning? As the collaborating teachers came to see that interns needed help in learning to plan, the question of who is responsible to teach it surfaced. Over time, the CTs moved away from their initial belief that the university should teach planning, instead coming to see themselves as teachers of planning. Initially, Shelly and Kelly suggested the university was responsible to teach planning before teacher candidates began the internship.2 For example, when Kelly realized that the interns learned about planning in undergraduate courses but that MSU did not require teacher candidates to use the same lesson plan format, she stated, “I thought that they just came from the university with one that they were trained in using. I know at Central University they do that” (ctsg, 1-18-99). Shelly replied that she “would strongly encourage MSU to rethink that [stance],” suggesting that the responsibility for teaching planning rested with the university and that teaching planning meant training interns in how to use a given format. 2 This belief is understandable since historically prospective teachers have learned how to plan at the university. 140 Peggy felt that I should be responsible for teaching planning. She advised me to videotape a CT’s lesson then view it with the interns, helping them unpack what they were seeing. Peggy: What if you taped a lesson, even if it was one of us, then look at it with them and say ‘what did she do before she started the lesson?’ and have them talk about it. They would see the parts of a lesson that way. They would see us not just stand up there and just say ‘I’m going to read this book.’ (ctsg, 1-18-99) Peggy seemed to believe that collectively watching a CT teach a lesson would help the interns learn “the parts of a lesson.” It is unclear how Peggy’s suggestion would help interns learn how to plan, particularly since the one who had done the planning for the lesson would not be present to even discuss her planning. This concern notwithstanding, Peggy asserted that I should be the one to orchestrate this activity. This was but one idea Peggy had about who is responsible to teach planning. She also considered her own role in inducting novices into this central task of teaching. For example, while describing concerns she had about her intern’s ability to plan, Peggy recognized that she was not modeling planning for him. And later when John encountered difficulties while teaching from Peggy’s sketchy plans, she noted that she should have talked in greater detail with John. Sandy, too, made comments during the study group that suggested she was beginning to view herself as a teacher of planning. After studying an artifact of my mentoring practice in the study group, Sandy commented, “You make it look so easy, yet when I’m sitting with Liz, it’s like I can’t even think of the questions to get her thinking at a deeper level” (ctsg, 2-8-99). Teaching planning in the abstract or as an authentic activity? Once the CTs began to understand that they had a role to play as teachers of planning, I knew they 141 would need support in learning how to enact that role. Toward that end, I asked if one of the CTs would allow me to videotape an upcoming planning session, expressing my intent to develop an artifact of practice from the videotaped session to use in exploring this part of their mentoring work. Shelly agreed to let me sit in on a session she held with her intern, Beth. Shelly was developing an upcoming thematic unit on bears and wanted to help Beth better understand how she approached this task. Up until that point, I had not witnessed a single planning session between CTs and their interns. The previous year I had felt uncomfortable asking permission to join their conversations, worried that such a request might appear to be an implicit criticism of the CTs as instructional planners or teachers of planning. My request to make an artifact of practice from their planning session became a way to gain entry into what had otherwise been unknown territory for me. Given Shelly’s stated purpose for the planning session, I assumed she would actually do the planning in front of Beth, explaining what she was doing and why. Instead, Shelly talked about planning in the abstract, explaining how she plans in general. Shelly first defined “thematic unit,” stating that it is process-oriented and inquiry- based, connects to later curriculum, “supports what children already know” and involves “learning experiences, not activities” (planning session, 10-6-98). She explained that the bear unit fit into the current year-long theme, “our big backyard.” Shelly then noted that she begins to plan by consulting district benchmarks and curriculum guidelines, which act as a “road map” to help her define the unit’s objectives. The resources and benchmark standards were sitting on the table, yet Shelly did not open them or show Beth how she actually makes those curricular decisions. 142 After determining the purposes for her unit, she then “plans” it by gathering curricular resources and “think[ing] about all the content areas and asking yourself, ‘how is this information important to a five year old?”’ (planning session, 10-6-98). While Shelly explained the need to consider the “historical, economic, and geographic perspectives” of bears and to use math and literacy in their study of them, she did not discuss specific learning activities she might design to address these content areas. She explained that in terms of resources, she would use books, music, and videos, yet the stack of mostly nonfiction books Shelly had gathered sat at a nearby table, unexamined. Nor did Shelly talk Beth through how and why she chose them or how she might actually use them in the unit. Instead Shelly stated that once she has determined her objectives and gathered resources, she asks herself, “What specific materials will I need and how will I set up instruction? And what help will students need in learning how to use the materials?” without answering these questions in relation to the bear unit. Throughout this planning session, Beth appeared bored and disinterested. She moved farther and farther away from the table and slumped in her chair as Shelly talked at her. At the time I had been impressed by Shelly’s ability to articulate her approach to planning from scratch, especially since I had been aware of the challenges mentors face in articulating their practical knowledge. But I had also wondered what impact this “lecture” might have had on Beth’s learning to plan and how much more powerful the experience could have been if Shelly had actually planned with Beth rather than talking about it. This planning session contrasts sharply with a co-planning session described by Feiman-Nemser and Beasley (1997) in which the mentor, Beasley, focused on planning a 143 literacy unit around the books of Leonard Everett Fisher. While Beasley had taught many author studies to her second graders in the past, she had never taught Fisher’s books, so she and her intern spent considerable time looking at the books together, becoming students of Fisher’s work. Initially the intern seemed surprised that they were not figuring out what to do with the students. Gradually she got pulled in to studying the texts with Kathy, reading the books out loud, examining the illustrations and sharing their interpretations of the drawings. Together they made discoveries about Fisher’s illustrations and noted aspects of his work that they wanted students to notice. This activity alternated with imagining possible learning activities. Near the end of the co- planning session, Kathy drew on her practical knowledge of author study units to make decisions about a sequence of learning activities given what she and her student teacher came to understand about the author/illustrator. F eiman-Nemser and Beasley (1997) argue that the primary goal of this planning session was to plan the unit, not to teach the novice how to plan. The novice’s learning was a product of the authentic activity of planning. In contrast, Shelly did not engage Beth in an exploration of the content she planned to teach during the bear unit. Nor did she talk about possible learning activities. Instead she described the process she goes through to plan a unit without actually doing the planning. What might explain Shelly’s decision to talk about planning in general rather than to model planning a particular unit? Perhaps she wanted to provide her intern with a broad overview of the steps she undertakes to design a thematic unit rather than get into the nitty-gritty details of the actual bear unit. Perhaps she did not share Team One’s concept of mentoring as “assisted performance” in which her intern would learn to plan 144 by gradually increasing her participation in Shelly’s planning. And why should she have? We had not discussed this idea privately or in the CT study group. She had not seen videotapes or transcripts of mentoring practice in which a CT engages her intern in an authentic planning task, other than my co-planning session with Liz described in chapter three. She certainly had not read the account of Beasley and her intern planning an author study. Looking back I realize that I should have explored this idea of mentored assistance explicitly in the study group. Mentoring Teachers of Planning While teaching planning requires a great deal of knowledge, skill and know-how, mentor teacher developers who help collaborating teachers become teachers of planning face additional challenges. All of the questions and issues embedded in the three arenas of instructional planning, learning planning and teaching planning come to bear. While these domains of knowledge are essential, they are not sufficient because mentor developers must know how to make pedagogical decisions. Where should they begin in helping classroom teachers build their capacity to teach novices how to plan? How can they find out what mentors know and understand about instructional planning and their interns as learners of planning without making them feel defensive? How can they help mentors tap into their practical knowledge about planning? What happens if the mentors are not strong instructional planners? Lacking an understanding of these questions and the issues embedded in the other three domains of knowledge I needed to draw from, my decisions about how to help the Sandburg collaborating teachers become teachers of planning produced unanticipated consequences. 145 Developing a curriculum of planning. In my first deliberate effort to focus the study group on planning, 1 had hoped to analyze what goes into lesson planning, believing that this would help the CTs understand just how much interns have to learn. I suggested that the CTs consider how they themselves plan by exploring the question, “What does good planning entail? What do you have to consider when you’re planning a lesson?” (ctsg, 1-11-99). After jotting down their individual thoughts, the teachers shared their ideas, which I recorded on chart paper.3 Their lively conversation generated a list of 26 different aspects of planning. Later I turned this list into a document, “A Curriculum of Planning,” which I organized around three central themes: (1) getting inside the content; (2) considering the students; and (3) mapping out the actual lesson. (see Appendix E) Considering how the content fits into the larger curriculum and relates to students’ daily lives, strengthening one’s own subject matter understanding, determining what students already know, choosing activities linked to stated purposes, and mapping out all of the nitty-gritty details (e.g. introduction, materials, directions, closure, assessment) were all aspects of planning the CTs mentioned. Several of the collaborating teachers had commented on the remarkable similarity in their ideas about planning. Sandy responded to one of Kelly’s ideas by saying, “That’s what I put down” (ctsg, 1-11-99). At one point Peggy noted, “Obviously we have a lot of the same things [listed].” She later stated, “When you compare our lists, we used different words but it was the same ideas.” Shelly echoed Peggy, saying, “Different words but it was the same ideas.” The tone of their comments was one of surprise and 3 While I had brainstormed my own list, I did not participate in sharing ideas because I 146 pleasure. The CTs seemed unaware that they shared the same ideas about planning, perhaps indicating how little they knew about each other’s practice. I had been struck by the similarities between their own vision of good planning and MSU’s which was reflected in the professional standards. Excited about these parallels and the CTs’ apparent consensus, I expected the Curriculum of Planning would become a tool in thinking about what interns need to learn about planning and how the CTs and I could help them become stronger planners. Developing a lesson plan format. When we met the following week, I asked the CTs to analyze an intem’s written lesson plan, specifically what her current understanding of planning was, what she still needed to learn, and what we might do to support and guide that learning. Along with the lesson plan, I distributed the Curriculum of Planning document they had created, suggesting that they use it to assess the intem’s plan. I deliberately chose a lesson plan that clearly demonstrated how little the intern understood about planning, reasoning that seeing how much this intern still needed to learn might shake up a potentially taken-for-granted assumption that interns already know how to plan. As the CTs recognized just how little this intern understood about the components of a lesson, let alone how to put together a coherent plan, Mary suggested that we design a lesson plan format for the interns to follow. Mary: Maybe we need to present, just give an intern an outline. Like when you’re thinking of doing your lesson plan, have a #1 that says ‘signal.’ Have them write down what they’re going to use for a signal. #2, ‘objective.’ State your objective of the lesson. Shelly: A format. wanted to capture what the collaborating teachers considered important in planning. 147 Pat: Mary: Sandy: Mary: Yeah. That’s it, a format. #3, ‘behavior and expectations.’ What it’s going to look like, like a real general format to guide them. Maybe what we could do is from our Curriculum of Planning we could take what are the big pieces here then create a structure they would fill rn. They need a springboard, somewhere to start, because it’s a big world out there with a lot of information. They’ve got a lot of teaching skills but they don’t know how to put it together and they need to have some sort of sequential order. I’m thinking even if you came up with a lesson plan form that states things like what is your signal because then it forces them to think about that. That’s what I’m talking about. Your signal, your objective. What are your directions? Your hook? (ctsg, 1-18-99) When Mary stated that the interns needed some guidelines when planning and that we should develop a form for our interns, I tried to sanction this suggestion, remarking that we could draw on the curriculum of planning document to help us determine a structure for our lesson plan form. Sandy thought that our lesson plan form should contain questions “like ‘what is your signal?’ because it would guide the intems’ thinking when planning. At the time I was excited by Mary’s suggestion because it was the first time she had participated actively in the study group. Usually quiet, Mary seemed determined to engage the group in the task she had named. Moreover, I believed that developing a lesson plan format around thoughtful questions would be an important tool for the CTs in working with interns. In framing the questions we wanted interns to consider when planning a lesson, I hoped that the CTs would pose these questions to their intern when planning together. For example, Peggy rarely asked John how he planned to open his lessons, yet she noted repeatedly that he failed to gain students’ attention at the beginning 148 of his lessons. Having the question in front of her might position Peggy to get John thinking about this aspect of his lessons. Sandy’s suggestion to develop “a lesson plan form” led all of us to generate questions to include. Mary suggested, “What are your directions?” and Peggy added, “What is going to be your assessment?” Shelly suggested that the interns consider what questions they are going to ask so that “they’re not trying to pull those off the tops of their heads because I think that sometimes it appears as though we do that.” Mary began to write our ideas down and included some of her own. I offered, “What directions are you going to give? What are your objectives?” which prompted Shelly to explain that her own intern had been writing up lesson plan objectives in terms of what she would teach rather than what students would learn. Sandy noted, “They need to know what an objective is.” Sandy suggested we add the question, “What are the kids learning?” (ctsg, 1-18-99) As we continued to generate questions to include, Kelly proposed that the CTs first write a lesson using the format before expecting the interns to use it. Kelly: We should do these as a model... modeling this, modeling writing through one, talking through one with the interns, doing ours. We could model going through a lesson that we’re going to teach so that we’re getting those parts in there. Pat: Kelly, that’s a great way to introduce this format by really writing a lesson plan. Have them watch you teach this lesson so that they can see the relationship between what you planned beforehand and what you do in the moment, and then they can begin to start using it themselves. Kelly: That will be nice for them to have. (ctsg, 1-18-99) I tried to reinforce Kelly’s suggestion, restating that each CT should introduce the lesson plan format to her intern by planning a lesson according to the form. I then added that the intern could use the plan while observing to note where the CT had modified her 149 plans in the moment, hoping to raise the interplay between preparation and improvisation. Everyone agreed to Kelly’s proposal. The collaborating teachers’ collective efforts resulted in the Sandburg Lesson Plan Format (see appendix F) which included key questions organized around two sections: (1) clarifying the content and (2) designing the lesson. Each section also contained several subheadings with questions that followed. For example, under the subheading “Objectives/Purpose,” two questions were listed to prompt intems’ thinking: “What do you want the students to learn/understand?” and “Why is this content important/relevant to them?” The following four questions were listed under the term “Activity/Learning Task”: What signal will you use to get students’ attention? How will you ‘hook’ the students so they want to learn more? How will you connect what you did yesterday to what they will do today? How will you help the students see how the content is relevant to their lives? Interestingly, the Sandburg Lesson Plan Format bears remarkable resemblance to a document contained in the Team One Collaborating Teacher Handbook (1998-99) entitled “Questions to Guide the Planning of Lessons and Units: The Planning Framework.” Each CT had been given a handbook at the outset of the school year, but by their own admission they rarely consulted it. When Mary suggested drafting their own lesson plan format, Kelly had asked, “They don’t have a thing like that from Michigan State?” When I reminded them that the MSU planning framework contained a series of questions, Mary countered, “Well, it’s not complete.” In this exchange, Kelly seemed unaware of the Team One Planning F rarnework, while Mary knew of its existence. 150 I did not consider the CTs’ efforts as simply “reinventing the wheel.” Rather, I interpreted this joint work as signaling a shift in their stance as mentors. This was one of the first times the CTs had suggested a concrete strategy for addressing a learning need of our interns. Previous comments had focused on what MSU could do programmatically to address various gaps. By articulating her concern that important aspects of planning were missing in Team One’s framework, Mary seemed to imply that we were well positioned to tackle this problem. When format alone is not enough. A full month passed before the study group returned to the issue of planning and our new lesson plan format. I had expected the collaborating teachers to follow through on Kelly’s suggestion, introducing the format to their intern by using it to plan one of their own lessons. When Peggy launched our conversation with a question about expectations for intems’ written plans, I quickly realized that this had not occurred. Peggy: I have a question for you guys. I have had to be very direct and firm with John about lesson plans. Many times he brings lesson plans to me that I feel are not complete and detailed enough. He doesn’t fight me on it but I got the impression that he wasn’t sure what the other interns were doing as far as lesson plans. So I didn’t know if you [Pat] were having them bring lesson plans to a guided practice seminar. Are they using that format that we developed? (2-22-99) Peggy’s question put everyone on the spot to share what they had done with the Sandburg Lesson Plan in the weeks since we had created it. The CTs’ responses suggested that we had not thought hard enough about how to introduce the format or what our expectations were for the interns using it. Kelly explained that because her intern seemed disinterested in using the format, Kelly “didn’t take it further.” Kelly: We talked about it. But there wasn’t a whole lot of interest. Jan didn’t want to use it much... I felt when I shared it with her there was a big ‘not interested’ kind of thing that went on. So I didn’t take it further. 151 Bonnie: No. .. They’re not using that format. Shelly: I said to Beth, and I hope I wasn’t mistaken, but I thought that the plan that you had typed up for us, I saw that as an outline. She did [use it] for her unit, to outline her unit. But she’s not using that for her daily [plans] because that’s three pages long... But Beth did give the impression that it was kind of optional. Was it optional? (ctsg, 2-22-99) I shared my surprise that none of the CTs had introduced the format since I thought they had agreed to do so. Once the interns had observed their CT develop then teach from the plan, I thought they were to begin using the format themselves. However, other than Shelly’s suggestion that her intern use the format to guide her unit outlines, the interns were not using the format at all. Nor were the interns putting much planning in writing regardless of format. What might have led every collaborating teacher to veer from what I had believed was our agreed upon plan for introducing the lesson plan format to the interns? Perhaps the CTs were unwilling to use the format to develop an extensive lesson plan because they normally did not engage in this lengthy form of preparation. Sandy seemed to express this sentiment during a study group session where Peggy raised concerns about John’s inability to plan. After listening to Peggy describe John’s difficulties, Mary concluded that John continued to struggle because planning had not been modeled for him. When Mary then suggested, as Kelly had earlier, that the interns “need to see us with a lesson plan like the kind we want them to do,” Sandy replied, “I don’t want to have to do that” (ctsg, 2-22-99) perhaps because this kind of planning felt unnecessary and unwarranted. I would also conjecture that the mentors felt they lacked the moral authority to require the interns to follow the lesson plan format so that modeling its use would have been futile. When the CTs designed and presented the format to the interns, they had 152 already completed more than half the internship. Because the CTs had previously failed to enforce expectations for intems’ written plans in the past, the collaborating teachers may have felt uncomfortable doing so mid-stream. When the interns subtly questioned the timing of the forrnat’s introduction, the CTs seemed to back down. Finally, Wenger’s notion of “reification” might account for the CTs’ unwillingness and/or inability to follow through on our agreed-upon plan to introduce the lesson plan format. Wenger (1998) defines reification as “the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into ‘thingness”’ (p. 58). When a community of practice engages in reification, they give form to their understood experience by producing some thing be it a tool, a representation, a procedure, etc. Wenger notes that the meaning of that artifact is not embedded in the thing itself. Rather, an artifact’s real meaning and power lies in members using that artifact in their ongoing practice. In other words, the process of reification should lead to further negotiated action which in turn leads to additional reification of those experiences into artifacts. While the process of reification can be a powerful tool for negotiating meaning among group members, it can also pose a danger. The ability to organize and succinctly capture a group’s experience can “lead to the illusion that one fully understands the processes it describes” (Wenger, 1998, p. 61). Thus reification prevails at the expense of using those materials/artifacts in practice to generate further meaning. The process of reification enabled the CTs to consolidate their experiences and understanding of lesson planning into a document; however, it is unclear how the understanding embedded in the format captured their actual practice as planners. Perhaps lacking a deeper understanding 153 of what planning entails beyond naming key components in the process, the CTs may not have been able to carry the document into their work as instructional planners and/or teachers of planning. There is some evidence to suggest that their espoused beliefs about good planning did not mirror how they actually approached this task. For example, while discussing the importance of helping interns frame worthwhile purposes, Peggy remarked, “Unfortunately very often the reason we’re teaching something is because that’s what is taught in the fifth grade” (ctsg, 3-29-99). This is a sentiment that I often heard Peggy share with her intern. For Peggy, it may have been reason enough to teach something because it was dictated through district frameworks. However, the planning format required interns to go beyond this stance and grapple with the question, “Why is this content relevant/important to students?” Thus using the planning format to design a lesson in front of her intern might have forced Peggy to grapple with questions she usually did not attend to when planning on her own. Peggy was not the only CT who may not have thought through some of the very questions she wanted her intern to consider when planning. Mary and Bonnie often told their interns that they did not have to plan when using the math and basal reading curriculum guides since everything was already “there.” Sandy, too, later recognized that she is “activity driven” in her planning, choosing activities like “let’s paint pretty pictures” rather than figuring out “this is the objective. How are we going to really make sure they learn this?” (interview, 3-16-99). Thus while our creation of the lesson plan format suggests that the CTs conceptually understood the components of lesson planning, 154 they lacked the “know-how” needed to use this reified artifact when planning with their intern. Discussion My efforts to help the CTs become stronger teachers of planning occurred within and across four complicated territories (see figure 1). Becoming a teacher of planning requires mentors to understand what planning entails, how it is learned, and how it can be taught. This involves the inter-related territories of instructional planning (the curriculum she must teach), learning planning (knowledge of the intern as a learner of planning and the challenges she faces), and teaching planning (the practice of assessing, supporting and guiding the intem’s learning to plan). Mentoring the CTs in becoming teachers of planning added a further layer of complexity. Besides needing to understand the three arenas outlined above, I had to know how to create opportunities for the CTs to recognize and enact their role as teachers of planning. I had to know how to teach my immediate “learners,” the CTs, and where they were coming from. In the following pages, I examine each territory in light of several key decisions I made and questions that these choices raise. Instructional planning. Becoming a teacher of planning requires the mentor to know the content she is expected to teach. Given that CTs have extensive experience planning for instruction, one might assume that the content to be taught is clear. While most agree that instructional planning is a central task of teaching, it remains under- conceptualized and ill-defined. Refining Clark and Peterson’s distinctions, I suggested that planning varies depending on the time frame and whether or not the teacher starts with prepared materials or creates curriculum of her own. In addition, a teacher’s vision 155 Lack knowledge of Conceptual and students, content . . For what practical and pedagogy 9 What '5 "' kind of understanding teaching? \ Instructional Planning Learning Planning Occurs in Different Forms gflgfll: Knowledge of curriculum for Teaching learning to plan Planning Knowledge of planning, learning to plan, and teaching planning Knowledge of novice as learner of planning Knowledge of how Mentoring to design learning Teachers of activities planning Knowledge of how to (13:32::ng Knowledge of Sandburg CTs as planners/teachers of planning Figure l: Mentoring Teachers of Planning 156 of good teaching influences the kind of planning she engages in. For example, if a teacher defines good teaching as responsiveness to students, her planning will be carried out with the expectation that she must improvise in the moment given the students’ ideas, questions and confusions. Thus not everything can be anticipated and planned for ahead of time. Conversely, planning with an image of teaching as imparting knowledge might entail scripting what the teacher will say and do. How to treat the territory of instructional planning? Decisions I made about how to treat the territory of planning influenced what the study group produced and learned. I put a lot of time, thought and energy into helping the collaborating teachers support interns in learning to plan lessons. I did this because of observations 1 had made of the intems’ teaching. It seemed that they either attempted to teach meaningful content but failed to consider ahead of time all of the nitty-gritty details or they attempted to teach a lesson that lacked a clear purpose. In other words, some of the interns were planning for the “how” of teaching and some were planning for the “what” but few were able to put “how,” “what” and “why” together. Zumwalt notes, If prospective teachers do not understand that questions of ‘what’ and ‘why’ are as central to teaching as the understandably pressing questions of ‘how,’ not only is the range and quality of their decision making drastically limited, but teaching can easily drift into a meaningless activity, for students as well as for teacher. (1989, p. 174) The interns often taught from plans that their CTs had read through and approved of. I wanted to help the CTs consider playing a larger role in helping interns strengthen individual lesson plans before they actually taught from them. University teacher educators often teach lesson planning as a rational, linear process where prospective teachers list educational objectives, procedures for activities, 157 materials and a means of assessment (May, 1986). However, several researchers (e. g. McCutcheon, 1995; Yinger, 1992; May, 1986) have questioned this linear form of planning since “real” teachers rarely develop detailed plans for given lessons. Clark and Peterson (1985) and May (1986) suggest that university teacher educators may need to modify how they describe and teach planning in ways that are more in line with how experienced teachers actually plan. I believe that novices do need help in developing individual lessons. Unlike experienced teachers who can mentally picture what an upcoming lesson will look like (McNeil, 1999; McCutcheon, 1980), novices lack such well-developed schema for imagining lessons. Thus while veteran teachers are able to figure out the details as they teach, making decisions in the moment based on past experience, prospective teachers are not as able to think on their feet. Understandably, teacher candidates need to spend more time getting ready to pull off lessons so that over time this form of preparation can become a mental habit. At the time I felt justified in my decision to focus on lesson planning. In retrospect, I have come to believe that our singular focus had its drawbacks. Nearly one hundred years ago, Dewey (1904/1965) challenged the merits of focusing on lesson planning in teacher preparation. He argued that student teachers face two challenges in learning to teach: mastering the curriculum from a pedagogical perspective (e.g. what is taught, how and why); and mastering classroom management. Dewey warned that novices are often thrown prematurely into the practical work of teaching without first developing the analytic skills needed to study how experienced teachers support children’s learning, how teachers elicit and respond to children’s questions, ideas and 158 confusions in ways that further their understanding. Without this ability to “see” how teachers establish the objective conditions that support and extend students’ “mental play,” novices fall into the trap of equating children’s outward behavior with learning. Dewey argued that requiring novices to develop individual lesson plans leads them further away from the “real” work of teaching where a teacher must “build up and modify his plans as he goes along from experience gained in contact with pupils” (p. 317). Designing individual plans keeps the student teacher from gaining a sense of the curricular “big picture.” Instead, the novice snatches at bits and pieces of the curriculum she is learning, trying to cram it into discrete lessons without thinking about the conditions that must be present to promote students’ intellectual growth. My decision to f0cus our study group sessions solely on lesson planning meant that we ignored the challenges of planning for students’ learning over time. How to negotiate a shared vision of good teaching? While the CTs and I reached some consensus about the components of a strong lesson plan, differences in our ideas about good teaching remained unresolved. In hindsight, I believe I avoided directly addressing this tension because I felt ill-prepared to negotiate this territory. As the university representative of a program deeply committed to a particular vision of good teaching, I felt that this vision was not up for negotiation. At the same time my ideas about what it meant to collaborate with our school partners made me uncomfortable with the expectation that I needed to bring the CTs “on board.” What if the CTs did not agree with the program’s vision? Caught between my collaborative stance and my belief in the power of the program’s views about teaching, I did not know how to reconcile these competing internal presses to remain true to the program’s vision as well as my belief in 159 the importance of collaboration and negotiation. Yet leaving our differences unexamined weakened our ability to reach shared understandings. Learning planning. Knowledge of the contours of planning, while important, is insufficient for becoming a teacher of planning. Mentors also must come to understand what is involved in learning planning. Not only must teacher candidates gain a conceptual understanding of what planning entails but also learn how to engage in different types of plarming. Thus learning to plan happens on both a conceptual and practical level. In addition to learning how to plan for individual lessons, teacher candidates must also learn to plan over time, figuring out how individual lessons cohere, how a sequence of activities enables children to develop and demonstrate their understanding, and how to assess what children come to understand. Novices face the challenge of learning to plan when they lack sufficient knowledge of their students, subject matter and pedagogy. To complicate matters, novices often learn planning in at least two contexts -- the school and university -- where they may receive mixed messages about what their plans should look like and what kind of teaching they should plan for. Teaching planning. In becoming a teacher of planning, collaborating teachers must draw on their knowledge of their learners as well as the curriculum of planning in making decisions about how to support and guide novices’ learning. While collaborating teachers are expected to assume this responsibility, they do not always see this as their role. Once CTs do come to acknowledge their central role in teaching planning, mentors must learn how to enact that role. Our study group interactions suggest that over time, the CTs did see the need to become teachers of planning. But I lacked knowledge of who the CTs were as planners 160 and teachers of planning. Uncomfortable about inserting myself into their planning sessions, I was unable to gather that information. The few times I got a glimpse of CTs engaged in planning were revealing. For example, Shelly’s planning session with Beth suggests that her ideas about what it means to support and guide an intern differed from my own. While I believed that mentors could teach planning by jointly engaging in authentic planning tasks with the intern, Shelly seemed to believe that she could help Beth learn to plan by describing the general steps Shelly goes through to develop a unit. At the time of the study, I had not realized our different ideas about mentoring, nor had I understood the importance of making those differences explicit. In retrospect, I realize I needed to grapple with how to help the CTs explore their underlying images of mentoring as well as identify potential differences between their own notions and the program’s vision of mentoring as assisted performance. Mentoring teachers of planning. As the mentor teacher developer, I had to draw on my own knowledge of instructional planning and how it can be taught and learned to design opportunities for the collaborating teachers to get inside this central task of teaching and come to see themselves as teachers of planning. For the most part, I relied on the study group as the context in which to support the CTs in learning to teach planning. In hindsight, however, this venue may not have been well suited to this purpose. Because I only had access to the CTs’ attempts to teach planning through their descriptions of them in our study group meetings, my questions and comments came after they had completed their mentoring work. I privately chided the CTs for providing feedback on intems’ plans after they had taught from them rather than helping the interns 161 strengthen their plans before teaching, but I fell into the same pattern, offering the CTs feedback on their efforts to teach planning after the fact as well. If I really believed in the idea of mentoring as a form of assisted performance where experienced teachers support novices’ efforts to engage in authentic teaching tasks, I should have been working directly with the CTs as they worked with interns on planning. I grew increasingly interested in finding ways to work jointly with the CTs as they supported their intem’s planning and teaching so that I could better align my own efforts to mentor them with my underlying vision of mentoring. The following chapter explores what happened when I expanded my mentor development role to include one- on-one coaching. Specifically, I examine what learning opportunities were created when I used Sandy’s mentoring efforts as a basis for her learning to mentor. I62 Chapter Five Mentored Learning to Mentor When I began this research study, I had planned to support the CTs’ learning to mentor in two ways -- the school-based study group that the collaborating teachers and I had launched the previous year, and individually coaching the CTs. The previous data chapters focused on the study group. In chapter three, I examined my pedagogy in using records of practice to foster analytic conversation. Chapter four explored planning as a central aspect of the learning to teach curriculum and the challenges I faced in using the study group to help the CTs become teachers of planning. While the study group conversations provided the CTs with important visions of the possible, knowing that they had an important role to play in fostering interns’ learning did not necessarily or easily translate into knowing how to enact that role. Reasoning that the CTs needed intensive support to develop their mentoring practice, I individually coached the CTs in their work with interns. This chapter examines one collaborating teacher’s learning to mentor in light of the assistance I provided her over a two-year period. Because I had not attempted to coach CTs in my previous liaison work, directly assisting them meant an expansion of my role and practice as a mentor developer. Initially I was uncertain what this work would entail and what challenges I might encounter. Certame I knew about mentoring as a form of assisted performance through my work with Team One. I had also read articles that grew out of Sharon Feiman- Nemser’s work with Kathy Beasley in which the two explore how experienced teachers 163 can guide and support novices’ learning to teach. These descriptive accounts gave me images of how a mentor can assist an intem’s performance as they engaged in authentic teaching tasks. To strengthen the CTs’ capacity to offer such guided assistance, I reasoned that as a mentor developer, I should engage in authentic mentoring tasks with the CTs, helping them assist their intern as they jointly engaged in teaching tasks. Through this joint mentoring work, I hoped to form an alliance with the CTs around our shared responsibility for supporting the interns. For much of my previous five years as a liaison, I had felt like the odd man out, a misplaced outsider unable to refrarne what seemed like an impenetrable alliance between the CT and intern. Most of the CTs either pegged me as the “out of touch” university representative who had little to offer since I lacked their shared, intimate knowledge of the classroom or eyed me as the overly critical supervisor from whom they needed to protect their intern. I saw the collaborating teachers and myself as joint teachers of the interns and wanted us to work as co-teachers toward our shared goal in fostering interns’ learning. While I brought this goal to my coaching work, I also had questions. Mentoring, like teaching, is more than an observable practice: it involves a great deal of intellectual work -- considerable judgment and decision making based on one’s understanding of the intem, beliefs about what she needs to learn and ideas about how to promote that learning. While our joint work with the interns would make my mentoring practice visible to the CTs, I wondered how I could make visible the intellectual work of mentoring, particularly since my own knowledge was embedded in my action and not always readily accessible to me. I further wondered how the CTs might actually learn how to pull off this intellectual work on their own. 164 The title of this chapter, “Mentored Learning to Mentor,” underscores the idea that what the CTs learned about supporting novices’ learning to teach was intertwined with how I mentored the CTs’ efforts to mentor their intern. This chapter examines how I used one CT’s mentoring as a site for her learning as well as what I learned from our joint work as a mentor teacher developer. Drawing on audio and video tapes of our joint mentoring work, field notes and interview data, I describe how Sandy grew in her understanding of her mentoring role and developed her practice over time.1 The chapter is organized around three portraits of Sandy as a mentor, depicting how her ideas about mentoring change over time. Nestled in between each portrait is a descriptive account of pivotal moments in our joint mentoring work that support her learning to mentor. After charting Sandy’s learning in relation to our joint work, I identify the critical elements in her learning to mentor and consider implications for fostering that learning. Interns as “Another Teacher in the Classroom”: A First Portrait of Sandy (1998) When Sandy accepted an MSU intern for the first time in 1997, she had assumed that interns were “highly skilled people” who brought a wealth of strategies and methods to the classroom so that “they would almost be another teacher in the classroom” (interview, 3-16-99). When her first intern did not conform to her expectations of acting “more as a professional and less as a student,” Sandy drafted a detailed letter to her building principal outlining her “concerns regarding the preparedness of the intern candidates that MSU is sending into classrooms” (undated letter, 1998). Specifically, she identified seven areas or “gaps” she felt “need[ed] to be addressed by the University” ' I do not claim that our joint work was the sole influence on her learning. Sandy also participated in the Sandburg CT study group and a cross-school mentor teacher study group. 165 including: lack of classroom experiences; discipline philosophies; learning styles; multiple intelligences theory; multi-age classrooms; brain research; and thematic teaching. With regard to thematic teaching, Sandy wrote: Interns seemed shocked and confused that the curriculum might not be textbook driven. They had never heard of a classroom gathering a variety of resources from the real world and allowing the children to engage in life experiences for maximum learning. Research shows this to be a much more effective way for teaching children than depending exclusively on textbooks. Yet, the interns have had no practice in methods classes on integrating subjects into thematic units. Life IS the integration of all these separate areas... It is essential that graduating education students have expertise in this area.” (undated letter, 1998) Concerned that interns lacked an understanding of or “expertise” in integrating curriculum, her letter indicated that the university should be responsible for addressing intems’ lack of knowledge and classroom experience. In it Sandy urged MSU to “reevaluate the frameworks they use in preparing interns.” Sandy’s stance is not surprising given her previous experiences as a cooperating teacher in a more traditional student teaching program at a nearby university. Sandy believed student teachers and by extension, interns, used her classroom as a “laboratory” to “practice and refine skills” they had learned at the university (interview, 3-16-99). Sandy had not yet made the paradigmatic shift to viewing the internship as a place for interns to learn how to teach, nor did she see herself as a school-based teacher educator, someone who could draw on her extensive knowledge of thematic teaching and multi-age classrooms to help novices learn. The blame for interns’ inadequacies rested squarely on the shoulders of the university, not the “field.” Sandy brought this limited understanding of her mentoring role to her work with her intern, Liz, during the 1998-1999 school year. 166 Identifying Differences in Our Mentoring Practice: An Initial Co-Observation To help Sandy develop her capacity to help Liz learn fiom her teaching, I conducted “co-observations” where Sandy and I individually took notes while observing Liz teach a lesson. After our joint observation, we met privately to discuss what we had noticed and would want to talk about with Liz. Finally, we jointly led the debriefing conference with Liz. Through these co-observations, I found that Sandy and I held different views about how to assess Liz’s lesson and help Liz learn from her practice. The first co-observation I conducted with Sandy centered on a literacy lesson Liz taught where she wanted the students to learn that “illustrations help us understand the meaning of a story; an author expresses his story in print and artistically” (lesson plan, 1 1-17-98). The lesson was a part of a larger unit Liz had designed from scratch around one of her own passions, quilting. The co-observation created opportunities for me to learn more about Sandy as a teacher and mentor. I drew on this knowledge when making decisions about how to further support and guide Sandy’s mentoring efforts. Before discussing the co-observation in detail, I offer the following summary of Liz’s lesson. Summary of Liz’s quilting lesson. Liz opened the lesson by reminding the students they had recently finished their “quilt” stories which consisted of a past, present and future family memory (i.e. something they were looking forward to doing with their family). After she showed them the text of a child’s family story, Liz said, “This story, as great as it is, is missing something.” Many of the students chanted “pictures!” Liz replied, “Pictures you can do that match the words in your story.” She then pulled out the book The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco, suggesting that as they listened to the story, they should see if the pictures matched the text. 167 Once she finished reading the story aloud, Liz stated, “I’m going to pick a page. You tell me if you see something.” Liz randomly opened the book to a page. A student noticed that some of the picture was in black and white while other parts had color. Liz: Which is in color? Student: The quilt. Liz: Why put only the quilt in color? Student 2: It’s old. Liz: Other ideas? Student 3: It was in the olden days. Liz: I’ll take one more then I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. Student 4: The quilt is colored cuz it’s old. Liz: When you look at the picture, the part I notice the most is what? Child 2: The blanket. Liz: The quilt. She wants us to notice it. The reason I wanted to share this book with you is because the author chose pictures that really helped you understand the story. Following this brief “discussion,” Liz told the students that they would create illustrations for their stories using a variety of materials including their own crayons and colored pencils as well as wallpaper squares, tissue papers and markers Liz had strategically located throughout the room. After providing some general directions for completing their illustrations, Liz revisited the student book she had used earlier as an example. When she read the first page from his story and asked what the child’s illustration might include, most of the responses related to the text but one, a soccer ball, did not. Liz asked, “Would I want to put an elephant on this page?” Most of the students answered “no” in chorus. As Liz sent the students to their desks to create their illustrations, a child raised his hand and asked, “Can you draw your own pictures?” Liz replied, “Yes, that’s what I want you to do.” The actual time Liz spent sharing and discussing the book took less than 12 minutes. For the remaining 20 minutes, the students created illustrations for their 3-page family stories. 168 Making sense of our observation. Immediately following our observation, Sandy and I privately discussed the lesson for nearly 20 minutes. I suggested we start by sharing what we had noticed. Sandy’s initial response led us to generate a list of a dozen strengths in the lesson, most of which centered on specific behaviors Liz had demonstrated. We noted Liz’s strong “teacher” presence (e.g. smiles and encouragement, relaxed demeanor, eye contact, gestures) and particular moves she had made (e.g. connecting yesterday’s work to the present day’s task, using a child’s text as the example, setting a purpose for listening to the story). Many of our responses to each other’s ideas signaled mutual agreement (e.g. I do too. Yeah. Yep. That’s what I’d written down too. Right. That’s what I thought. And I wrote that down too.). Interpreting a pivotal moment in the lesson. Our mutual agreement ended, however, when Sandy mentioned how much she liked Liz’s move to wonder out loud what the author might have been up to with the illustrations. When she asked them what they noticed about the pictures, they didn’t necessarily come up with the information she wanted so rather than saying ‘It’s this,’ she said ‘I wonder if Patricia Polocco was thinking of this as she was doing it.’ It got the information to them but not in an authoritative way. It was like ‘I wonder’ and through my wondering, you may come to some understanding. So I liked how she phrased that, I wonder if. (co-observation, 11-17-98) As I listened to Sandy’s comments, several thoughts went through my mind. I, too, had wanted to talk about this pivotal point in the lesson but for very different reasons. I didn’t experience Liz’s “think-aloud” as a strength. Rather, I felt Liz had resorted to a strategy many interns fall back on when faced with students who are unable to answer a question they pose -- they simply answer their own question. Such moments suggest several possible scenarios. When planning, the intern did not consider what the students would have to understand in order to answer particular questions. When teaching, the 169 intern was unable to evaluate the students’ responses on the spot and determine an alternative path for the discussion, or the intern may have suffered from a combination of a lack of preparation and teaching skill. I responded to Sandy’s comment by offering my own interpretation, hypothesizing that Liz had not thought hard enough about how she would use Polocco’s book to help the students learn that illustrations enhance the meaning of the story. She had a clear objective, interesting materials, and the makings of a great lesson, but I wondered how well Liz herself had explored the ways in which Polocco’s illustrations enhanced the story line. Other than posing several questions about the quilt being in color and stating that the author “chose pictures that really helped you understand the story,” Liz had done little to help the students explore how Polocco’s illustrations enhanced the text’s meaning. I had lots of questions about that piece. When I looked at her lesson plan, she wrote that she wanted them to understand illustrations enhance the meaning of the story. She had that overarching goal. But if I posed the question to her ‘how specifically do Polocco’s illustrations support the story?’ I don’t know what she would say about that. That part seemed really glossed over [in the lesson]. And then there’s this next question of okay, how could she elicit that from the kids? In my response to Sandy’s comment, I raised two interconnected questions. First, what was Laura’s subject matter understanding? My hunch was that Liz had neither carefully studied the text nor considered how the illustrations extended the story’s meaning. Second, how had she planned to help the students understand the connection between the story’s meaning and the illustrations? Again, I guessed that Liz had not consciously considered how she would help the students explore the relationship between the text and illustrations. I hoped to raise these questions directly with Liz because I saw them as an opportunity to “get below the surface” of Liz’s teaching, to move beyond the already 170 accomplished skills she had demonstrated. Sandy agreed that the “illustrations in that story were more abstract because you had to look for the patch of red.” The students ’ behavior vs. their understanding. I then raised another concern, namely that not only are the illustrations challenging to interpret, the story itself seemed to be difficult for the students to understand. It’s a hard story for young kids to connect to in the first place. Earlier even Liz said she was worried they would get fidgety because it’s long. I noticed they seemed more riveted at the end when Patricia was a young child and the illustrations show her playing. Then they could connect, but for the rest, they were looking at each other in confusion. I think it was hard for them to make sense of what the story was [about]. I had attempted to focus our talk on the lack of sense the students had made, noting that they were “looking at each other in confusion” to support my assertion that they had not comprehended the story. Sandy, however, offered a counter-argument, drawing on her own observations to make a claim about their behavior. From sitting with those kids day after day, I found that they were tuned in. We have some little boys who will roll on the floor. I saw them talk to each other a few times but they weren’t rolling. Even Michael who’s always apart from people, at least he joined us. So I perceived them as tuned in whereas you’re seeing that the conversation, but you don’t know. I mean, they make noises and roll on the floor. Even if they weren’t understanding, at least they were sitting quietly to let the other people [hear]. Sandy drew on her “insider” knowledge of the classroom and her students, comparing what they had done in the past, rolling around the floor and refusing to join the group, to what she had noticed them do during Liz’s lesson, sitting quietly. Sandy seemed to acknowledge that we were attending to different things but that ultimately, “even if they weren’t understanding, at least they were sitting quietly.” I responded by making explicit the different ways we were interpreting the students’ engagement, stating that Sandy had made an “important distinction between their inner and outer attention.” I clarified that while “outwardly their bodies were giving the impression” that the students 171 were attentive, we couldn’t really know whether or not they comprehended the story from ‘ outward appearance alone. Re-envisioning the lesson. I continued to pursue the question of what the students understood about the story and reasserted my belief that Liz needed to think harder about how to use the text as a tool for the students’ learning. When I suggested how Liz might have better supported the students’ investigation of the illustration by explicitly “giving them time to look,” Sandy began to consider alternative ways to use the text given Liz’s purpose for the lesson. Sandy: Even before the reading, she could have had the kids just look through the pictures to see the story that you get, then see if the text supports the pictures. This is going to sound really stupid, but until this summer when I realized that there’s lots of things to look at in the pictures, I just thought pictures were something the illustrators put in to entertain the kids while you read the story. I never thought of the concept of giving additional information, of the validity of just tuning into the art. It’s a picture book. What information do we get from that? So that was like an a-ha for me. Pat: So even asking them just to describe what’s happening in this picture. Maybe they could have made the connection that Sandy: ‘I noticed that she used some red over here. Why do you think that is?’ ‘Oh, and there’s red in this one.’ You know? And then maybe they would see the tie-in that that’s from the page before. In this exchange, Sandy began playing around with possibilities, trying to get a better fit between Liz’s purposes and what she could do with the text to help the students reach that objective. Rather than start with the text, Sandy suggested first trying to tell a story from the pictures. When Sandy explained that she would want to sit down and study the book before teaching with it, I suggested that she might actually carry out such a task with Liz. Sandy: I would feel that I needed to sit down and read the book myself. Just from that one reading, I haven’t gotten everything out of the book. That’s a book I would really want to sit down and study and think about. 172 Pat: In terms of planning, maybe you could sit down with Liz. She’s got such great ideas, but slowing down a little just to make sure she has a really strong understanding. Sandy: Yeah, I mean that you understand it before you share it with others. Sandy recognized that she would need to spend time unpacking the book, getting inside its contents in order to appreciate its complexity if she were going to use the text. She seemed to recognize that Liz must thoroughly know the text since a person must “understand it before you share it with others.” To my knowledge, however, she had not made such a suggestion to Liz about studying the book as she planned her unit. Nor did Sandy share her own recent insights into the connection between text and illustrations. It did not seem to occur to Sandy to check Liz’s understanding of the text before she taught the lesson or to study it with Liz. Over time I wanted to help Sandy understand the value of helping her intern consider her own subject matter knowledge before teaching. Before wrapping up our discussion of Liz’s lesson, I quickly shifted our focus to the upcoming debriefing conference, stating “One of the questions I want to ask Liz because I’m curious is what does she think that the students learned from this? Did they understand that big idea and how does she know?” Lacking the time to do more than briefly mention a question I wanted to raise, we set a time to meet with Liz later that day. The debriefing conference. The three-way conference with Liz paralleled my earlier conversation with Sandy. Sandy’s comments were overwhelmingly positive while mine were a mixture of strengths, concerns and analytic questions. Initially, we were all fairly congratulatory of Liz’s teaching. Sandy commented on the “warm, fuzzy way” Liz started out the lesson. I mentioned that Liz had established a meaningful purpose for reading the book given the students’ upcoming task to develop illustrations for their own stories. 173 Student behavior vs. student understanding. Sandy then raised the issue of the students’ behavior, stating how pleased she was with the way the students sat through the story compared to previous whole group sessions. Sandy: Pat noticed that some of the little guys were talking but I said you need to understand what they’re usually like. Even though Jeffrey and Avery talked a few times, they weren’t rolling on the floor or making noises. Liz: Oh yeah, it was good. P... Sandy: Even Michael. He was off to the side, but every so often he would stop and there were glimpses where he’d be tuned in. (debriefing, 11-17-98) In my private conversation with Sandy, I had stated my concern that the students did not seem to understand the story line as they listened to it and as evidence for this claim I stated that “they were looking at each other in confusion.” When talking to Liz, however, Sandy seemed to refrarne my concern in terms of their outward behavior, making a counter claim that the students were in fact well behaved. Hoping to engage Liz in making sense of her own teaching rather than Sandy and I solely evaluating her lesson, I posed an analytic question, asking Liz to consider what she had wanted the students to learn. She explained, “I hope they got out of it that illustrations convey meaning and give more meaning to stories.” I then asked Liz if she thought the students learned these two big ideas, that illustrations and text must be related and illustrations actually enhance the meaning of the text. Liz: When they all went back to their desks, I saw a lot of connection between the text and their illustrations. I think that they got the message that it has to have something to do with it. Andrea, for instance, read to me what she wrote, and then I said ‘Now, what do you want to draw a picture of?’ and she said ‘me and my sister and playing school’ and I was like okay. She got it. Judging by walking around which was how I was planning on assessing anyway, I thought it worked. Liz provided evidence that the students understood the first objective (e.g. Andrea’s idea for her illustration was connected to what she had written). She did not, however, 174 elaborate on the second and more challenging objective, to help the students understand that illustrations actually convey more about the story than the text can do alone. Wanting to help Liz explore the brief discussion she held with the students, I asked, “What were you thinking and feeling when you led the discussion?” Liz’s response revealed her understanding of what it means to elicit students’ ideas. Liz: I wasn’t feeling any pressure for them to be saying the right thing at all. I ‘“ wanted them to say what they wanted to say. There was one point I think where I said something like ‘Now I was thinking.’ Sandy: Yeah, you said ‘I wonder if that’s what she wanted us to notice.’ So it was like you posed it as an ‘I wonder if‘ which allowed them to make the connections like oh, yeah, that was it. So I like that ‘I wonder if.’ Liz: I wanted to validate everything they were saying without trying to say 5 ‘and the answer really is.’ Sure, those were cute ideas, but -- so I was trying to still get them the message without having to say ‘what you have said is not correct.’ Liz seemed to believe students should have the chance to say whatever they think. Her role as the teacher is not to evaluate their responses but rather to let them share before stepping in “to get them the message” without saying that they are wrong. Rather than viewing the students’ responses as windows into their thinking or something worth pursuing, Liz seemed to think they simply “were cute.” Sandy supported Liz’s move to offer her own ideas during the discussion. Exploring Liz ’s planning. When I noted that Liz had chosen “a random illustration” for the students to study, Liz acknowledged that she “hadn’t even planned that page. [She] hadn’t even planned to pick one particular thing.” Liz simply “opened it up to any page and showed it.” I suggested that in the future she might “deliberately choose an illustration,” study it herself, then think about how to help the students study it. That way Liz would be better positioned to help the students “consider how [Polocco’s] decision to do black white and red support and extend that part of the story.” Liz began I75 considering alternative moves for the lesson, much the same way Sandy and I had in our earlier conversation, noting that if she “hadn’t been so impromptu, [she] would have really thought about it ahead of time.” Sandy then offered her own ideas about what Liz could have done differently, suggesting Liz conduct a “picture walk” of the book first, asking the students to tell a story from the illustrations before reading the text aloud. Analysis of the co—observation. When Sandy and I privately discussed our initial observations, 1 had mistakenly assumed Sandy would embrace my interpretation of Liz’s lesson. During the conference, when it was clear that Sandy had not changed her mind, I grew frustrated. In my field notes I wrote that it had felt like a “good cop, bad i cop” situation. In retrospect, I realize that our different assessments of the lesson reflected different views about what it means to teach and what mentors should do to guide and support an intem’s learning, views that rarely change quickly or easily. The co-observation helped me learn more about Sandy’s beliefs as well as my own values and assumptions. Differences in how we assessed Liz ’s teaching. When Sandy observed Liz’s lesson, she focused on how students were behaving, comparing how the students conducted themselves in earlier whole group sessions with the one Liz held. I, on the other hand, had looked at the students’ “inner attention,” (Dewey, 1904) at their intellectual involvement in the subject matter. This difference became a recurrent pattern in our co-observations of Liz, revealing that we used different lenses to make sense of Liz’s teaching. What did it signify about our views of teaching? 176 For me, the success of an intem’s lesson lies in how well she engages students. Sandy seemed to determine the success of Liz’s teaching based on students’ outward behavior. In a conversation we had later that year, Sandy identified this difference: When I look at the [class]room, I’m seeing the big picture. I’m saying look, they’re over there sharing and oh, they’re engaged in this. Or I ’11 see the eye contact and see them writing and I’ll say oh, they’re on task and they’re working. I’m so into the management and seeing the big picture, that no one is rolling on the floor or strangling somebody and that they’re with their groups that I’m not as tuned into the conversations, the individual conversations. I’m 1 sort of thinking if I allow myself to really get involved in those, and I’m not always aware of the big picture and what’s going on, then they’re going to be off task. (interview, 3-16-99) For Sandy, what mattered most was seeing “the big picture,” a tall order in her classroom since children often engaged in many different activities at any given time. If Sandy looked around the classroom and saw no visible signs of “off task” behavior, she felt that “they’re engaged.” If she attended to their conversations, she worried that her ability to orchestrate the big picture would be compromised. Given my belief that supporting and stretching student thinking lies at the heart of good teaching, I wanted to help Sandy learn to attend to students’ intellectual engagement as she helped Liz develop this capacity. Differences in how we mentored Liz. Besides these differences in what we noticed, we also held different ideas about how to help Liz learn from her teaching. When conferencing with an intern, my goal is to help her learn to assess her own practice. Rather than doing all the evaluative work by offering a laundry list of strengths and things to work on, I try to pose analytic questions designed to help the intern make sense of her lesson in light of student learning. This approach reflects my belief that learning entails exploring one’s questions, ideas and confusions and teaching involves eliciting and responding to students’ thinking, so I pose questions that engage the intern in analyzing students’ understanding. I77 Sandy did most of the evaluating herself instead of engaging Liz in this analytic task. The bulk of Sandy’s comments focused on Liz’s performance rather than students’ learning. She used the same “telling” strategy that Liz had used during the story book discussion, one that Sandy herself had admired. Perhaps Sandy thought her role was to share what she had noticed rather than elicit and respond to Liz’s ideas about her teaching. Given my own observations of Sandy’s teaching, I wondered if perhaps her approach to mentoring may have reflected an underlying vision of practice where teachers tell what they know. If this was the case, I wondered how we could reach some shared understanding of what to attend to in Liz’s teaching and how to help Liz make sense of her practice. A further difference in our mentoring approach lay in how we grounded our conversation with Liz. When I observe an intern teach, I script what she and the students say. My practice of recording their talk reflects an underlying assumption that mentors should bring an analytic stance to their work, providing valuable data to help interns make sense of their teaching. I try to keep my evaluations to a minimum, recording the dialogue so that later on I can help the intern assess our interpretations in light of the record. While Sandy had taken some notes during the observation, her recorded comments were mostly interpretations rather than descriptions of what had happened. When we later discussed the lesson alone and with Liz, we lacked a shared “text” to use in checking our different interpretations. I gradually realized that I needed to make explicit why it was important to make a detailed record of the observation. The co-observation as a coaching event. The co-observation also created an opportunity to assist Sandy’s performance. When Sandy and I privately analyzed Liz’s 178 _. “‘7. L ”'3' lesson, I suggested an alternative move Liz could have made to help the students study a particular illustration. That “think aloud” prompted Sandy to begin playing around with different ways to use the picture book given Liz’s purposes for the lesson. Our generation of alternative teaching moves resurfaced during the debriefing conference. When I suggested that Liz might have chosen a specific illustration for students to study rather than flipping to a random page, Sandy shared and elaborated on her own idea for introducing the text. Sandy’s suggestion was more closely aligned to Liz’s goal of helping the students understand the relationship between illustrations and text, something Liz had not carefully considered before teaching the lesson. V'_”" "—3" 1' i The conversation enabled Sandy to plan the lesson given Liz’s purposes. Usually Liz planned on her own, and Sandy regularly gave a heart-felt stamp of approval to Liz’s written plans. Sandy had in fact read over Liz’s plans for this lesson without suggesting any revisions. During the debriefing conference, Sandy became a teacher trying to figure out how to help the students learn Liz’s objective using the text she had chosen. She considered her personal connections to the content the students were to learn, recognizing that only recently had she learned that illustrations extend the story rather than simply occupy kids’ attention. The co-observation enabled Sandy to draw on her practical knowledge as she jointly engaged in planning with Liz. In the process, Sandy engaged in a very different approach to mentoring where joint engagement in authentic teaching tasks becomes the means to foster intems’ learning. Not only did Sandy engage in a different approach to mentoring but a different kind of planning. In describing herself as a planner, Sandy admitted that she often paid attention to “cute activities” that physically engaged students without also considering 179 their intellectual engagement (interview, 3-16-99). The co-observation helped her think more deeply about the content and pedagogy of the lesson, not simply whether or not it was a “neat” activity. I hoped that Sandy would embrace this kind of planning in her own teaching, which would strengthen her ability to help Liz learn to plan. Attending to Subject Matter Knowledge: A Later Co-Observation For the remainder of that fall and winter, I conducted co-observations with the five other collaborating teachers and their intems in addition to leading the CT study group. Therefore several months had passed before I conducted a second co-observation of Liz’s teaching that spring. I remained concerned that Liz planned lessons and units in terms of “activities” rather than in terms of what students could learn and continued to feel unsure how to help her examine the evidence she relied on when making claims about her students’ understanding. I worried that she lacked a deep understanding of the content she was about to teach. When I met with Liz to discuss her plans for an upcoming science unit on sound, my attempts to engage Liz in exploring her subject matter knowledge by raising genuine questions I had about how sound travels had gone nowhere. This second co-observation of a science lesson enabled me to learn more about Sandy as a mentor and to continue modeling making sense of Liz’s teaching in relation to students’ learning. It also drew Sandy into puzzling about the content of the lesson, something she rarely focused on in her mentoring. This, in turn, helped me further refine a curriculum for Sandy’s learning to mentor. Summary of Liz’s science lesson. Liz taught this science lesson during a two- week unit on sound. Her main objectives for the unit were to understand that (a) 180 vibrations produce sound; (b) sound travels in the form of waves; and (c) sound can travel through solids, liquids and gases (unit plan, 2-24-99). Liz engaged in whole group instruction for less than fifteen minutes. She opened the lesson by sharing a big book written by last year’s students, then taught a song called “Sound,” pointing to the words on an overhead as the students sang along. Afterwards, Liz hit a tuning fork, held it up to her microphone then touched the tuning fork with her hand. After repeating the experiment, she asked the students what had happened. Most responded that the tuning fork no longer made any noise. When she asked why it had stopped making noise, the students noted that Liz had stopped it from vibrating. Liz concluded this segment of the lesson by stating, “So we know sounds are made from vibrations” (lesson, 2-24-99). Next, Liz wondered aloud if sound can travel through water. Placing a clear glass bowl filled with water on the overhead projector, she hit the tuning fork then plunged it into the bowl of water, creating a splash. The students grew very excited and moved closer to the projector. Liz repeated the activity, this time creating a splash big enough to reach several students, prompting them to laugh and talk. A child stood up and declared that he knew what had happened. Liz asked the students twice to listen to Michael’s explanation in order to regain their attention -- Liz “hit the metal, put it in the water, the vibration goes off, and it splashes us.” Liz responded, “So we know sound travels through water” (lesson 2-24-99). Liz then told the students they would conduct their own experiment, focusing on two questions: “Do you think sound can travel through solids? And if so, how well does sound travel through solids?” She showed them the lab sheet to fill out as they conducted the experiment, directing them to scratch the surface of a desk then rate the sound it 181 makes on a scale of one to ten. Next, the students should place their head on the desk then scratch the desk’s surface again, rating the sound it makes. Finally, the students should answer the questions on the lab sheet (e. g. What happened? What did you learn?). Liz stated this would enable them “to tell [her] if sound travels through solids and if so, how well.” As the students conducted the experiments, most noticed the sound was amplified when they rested their head on the desk but could not explain why. Many students struggled to answer the question “What did we learn?” on their lab sheet. Sharing our observations. Due to time constraints, Sandy and I spent only a few minutes talking about the science lesson. I mentioned that Liz had taught at an incredibly fast pace. I also noted that Liz had asked several big questions (e.g. Can sound travel through water? Can sound travel through solids? If so, how well?), but had not given the students time to grapple with them. I worried that the students had limited opportunities to share their ideas, explore their understanding and raise questions about the experiments and what they may have proved. I further wondered how the water experiment supported Liz’s conclusion that the students understood sound travels through water. Finally, I mentioned that while novices understandably faced challenges in knowing how to respond to students’ ideas in the moment, I worried that Liz did not even seem to understand the importance of attending to students’ thinking. She did not appear interested in their ideas nor did she probe their responses to her questions. Sandy was amazed that I could “see” all that in Liz’s lesson, explaining that while she observed the lesson, she thought Liz’s “management was great, everything was great.” By comparing my analysis of the lesson with her own, Sandy seemed to express curiosity about how I reached my assessment. I said that there was a lot of energy during 182 the lesson but that Liz needed to learn how to harness and direct it in ways that better supported the children’s learning, not simply their participation in the activity. I also wondered what the students had actually learned from the lesson since so few had been able to answer the question “What did you learn?” after conducting the desk-scratching experiment. In this sense, I tried to articulate questions that the lesson had raised for me. Sandy then expressed her only concern, mentioning the point in the lesson when the students had grown excited about the splash from the tuning fork. Sandy felt that Liz had struggled to “regain control” of the students and explained that while videotaping the instructional portion of Liz’s lesson, she had deliberately turned the video camera away I from Liz at that moment, instead “catching” a girl who had stood up rather than remaining seated. Sandy believed that Liz had been unaware of this child’s behavior and hoped that viewing the video would help Liz understand that she needed to pay closer attention to her classroom management. I did not agree with Sandy’s interpretation of this moment in the lesson. I had been encouraged by the students’ enthusiasm and felt that Liz’s strategy to refocus their attention on a peer’s explanation worked well. However, I kept this alternative interpretation to myself, feeling that if I wanted Sandy to adopt my own agenda for the debriefing conference (e.g. students’ learning), at the very least I should be willing to adopt Sandy’s agenda (e.g. students’ behavior). From this brief conversation about our observations, I felt that we had constructed a dual focus for the debriefing conference. We suggested that Liz watch the video before jointly debriefing the lesson the next day. The debriefing conference. When we met the following day, we debriefed Liz’s lesson for nearly 35 minutes. Liz began the debriefing conference by joking about 183 Sandy’s videotaping abilities. I commented on the quick tempo of the lesson, stating that I was unable “to take many notes because so much was going on” (debriefing, 2-25-99). Laura picked up on the idea of pacing. Liz: I did notice I moved fast. But then I didn’t feel like I lost them [while] watching the video. Pat: You don’t think you lost them. Liz: No, I don’t think I lost them. f Sandy: No, most of them were really tuned in... While she recognized the quick pacing of the lesson, Liz thought the students were with her. This was helpful information to me. I also noticed that Liz was quick to make Fun '- -nr- u" f I claims about the students’ understanding, assertions that once again Sandy supported. Considering alternative moves. Wanting to respect Sandy’s interest in the incident where the students had talked enthusiastically among themselves after being splashed by the tuning fork, I posed an open-ended question about it. Liz seemed to define that moment in her lesson as an engagement issue, feeling that she had successfully met her objective to arouse excitement about the splashing phenomenon. Pat: An interesting place in the lesson was when the kids were so enthusiastic about the splash. How were you feeling at that point? What was going on in your head? Liz: I wanted them all on their knees, laughing. I liked it loud. To be honest, if I were in a classroom by myself, I would have allowed the excitement to continue before I had to settle them and let Michael go on with that explanation because they all wanted to say something. I was like, okay, ‘Michael’ to keep the pace going... the whole effect and I had built it up was for them to get excited. Then they got excited and I said, ‘okay.’ I didn’t like having to do that because I like having fun with them. That was neat that they were really learning. Because the students were having fun, Liz believed “that they were really learning.” She seemed to equate engagement with fun and fun with learning. 184 For the first time, Sandy engaged Liz in making sense of her teaching by posing an analytic question, something I had previously modeled. Sandy asked Liz, “How could you accommodate them wanting [to talk]? Can you think of some strategies that you can use to accommodate their all wanting to share at once?” Liz quickly remembered that both Sandy and her team teacher “often say ‘turn to your neighbor and explain what you just saw or why that might have happened.”’ Sandy replied that because the students “were going to talk,” Liz needed to “give them permission to do what they’re doing anyway.” I suggested that Liz sanction their talk for another reason, arguing that “it’s important talk for them to have because they’re still trying to figure out what was going on.” When Liz agreed that “it would have been nice for them to have the chance to talk about it,” Sandy replied, “So it’s real important for them to begin thinking of the process, about the whys in life and be able to verbalize that.” Initially Sandy argued that since the students were going to talk anyway, Liz should have sanctioned their talk by giving them permission to converse. I countered that students also needed that time to make sense of what they had just witnessed. While we both felt Liz needed to let the students talk, we still had different ideas about why that talk was important. While Sandy framed this moment in Liz’s lesson as a management issue, how to manage the talk, I attempted to frame this as a learning issue, why the students needed to talk. Sandy then seemed to pick up on this distinction, reinforcing my point that students need time to think and “verbalize” what had happened, suggesting she had made a subtle change in her thinking. 185 “1 think [they] really get it. ” Wanting to explore Liz’s assertion that the students were “really learning,” I offered some counter-evidence, mentioning that several students whom I worked with did not know what the desk-scratching experiment proved. Liz replied that I had not talked to the “right kids.” I countered that students “can give the right response but have no understanding of what it means,” suggesting that unless students can explain their thinking, right answers do not mean much. Defending herself, Liz replied, “You weren’t here for it, but later we discussed what was learned.” Sandy picked up on my assertion that students can provide right answers without having an underlying understanding of what the answers mean. She explained: Or they understand the jargon. I mean, when I say ‘Gee, it rained out. What happened to the water?’ they all say it evaporated. ‘What’s evaporation?’ I ask. ‘Um, I don’t know.’ So they have the vocabulary but they don’t have the understanding behind it... Even vibration. They’ll say sound is vibration. But if you ask them what vibration is, I wonder how many get the back and forth. Sandy pushed Liz to consider the possibility that students could use terminology correctly without being able to define the terms and related a similar example in her own practice to let Liz know that Sandy, too, had faced this problem in her teaching. Wondering about the content. Sandy’s example got the three of us to explore our own understanding of the content Liz had taught. Liz explained that she had wanted to conduct another experiment where she would strike a tuning fork, “hold it in the air, then move it on the table” so that students could notice that the sound becomes magnified when the tuning fork hits the table. Sandy: I wonder if in the desk as far as amplification - Liz: The echo? I didn’t want to touch on echo. Pat: Wait, I’m wondering why the tuning fork stops [vibrating] when you touch it but it wouldn’t stop when you touch a solid like the desk? How would they be able to hear it? 186 Liz: I know what you mean. Sandy: You had me wondering yesterday. I scratched the desk. And then I started thinking well, wait a minute, my head is on the desk. That should stop the vibration. I was like, I’m an adult and I wanted to go over and say to Liz, well, why can I hear it better? My head should be stopping [the sound]. Liz: That’s a great question. I don’t know that answer. Sandy: But isn’t liquid the best conductor of sound? Liz: Solids are the best, liquid then air. The best solid conductor of sound is metal if that makes it any easier. Sandy: It’s not as porous, maybe? Liz: Maybe that’s it. I just read that metal is the best conductor. Maybe vibration travels better through metal. They don’t tell you things like that. Sandy: Gee, we’re wondering. Sandy began this final segment of our conversation with “I wonder” and from there all three of us shared genuine questions about sound and how it travels, in the process exposing our limited subject matter knowledge. While Liz could give “correct” answers such as solids are the best conductors of sound, she, like her students, seemed only to have a surface understanding. Liz could not explain why metals are the best conductor of all solids nor why the tuning fork would continue to vibrate after touching it to a solid. Analysis of debriefing conference. In the first debriefing session on Liz’s quilt lesson, Sandy and I lacked a shared assessment of the lesson and a shared vision for how to help Liz learn from her teaching. In this debriefing conference, Sandy and I were more in sync. We both attended to issues of management and student learning by raising analytic questions to help Liz make sense of her lesson. In addition, we both expressed confusions about our own understanding of sound. This second co-observation enabled Sandy to make small but significant changes in her approach to mentoring and raised a 187 new topic for our joint mentoring work, helping Liz explore her own subject matter understanding, a topic that I had been unsuccessful addressing alone. Synchronizing our eflorts to mentor Liz. In the first co-observation, Sandy took an initial step toward becoming a student of the subject matter by recognizing and acknowledging that she would need to study the Polocco text before teaching it, but she stopped short of opening up the book and doing that. In this second co-observation, however, Sandy did become a student of the content. The conversation seemed to flee her to become a learner, to grapple with big ideas embedded in the lesson and express not only curiosity but uncertainty about their meaning. Doing so enabled all of us to discuss our confusions about sound for the first time. Rather than relying on a mode of mentoring as “telling” her intern what had gone well or what needed improvement, Sandy jointly engaged in the task of analyzing the lesson, raising questions for which she did not have predetermined answers. In the process, Sandy shifted away from her initial stance that “most of the [students] were really tuned in,” later raising questions about what the students actually learned and challenging Liz’s claims about their understanding. Her willingness to expose her own questions was significant given the fact that Sandy had taught a “sound” unit earlier in the school year. Here she was expressing her own uncertainty and confusion about content she had already taught. In this sense, seriously working on her mentoring brought Sandy into deeper work on her teaching. Teaching requires us to become learners of the content -- getting curious, raising questions, figuring out what does not make sense. Then we are in a better position to help students engage in the same kind of intellectual inquiry. Our conversation enabled Sandy to get below the surface of the subject matter, to figure out what did not make 188 sense to her. Working on her teaching in turn helped Sandy become a better mentor. If Sandy had remained unaware that she did not understand the content, how could she help Liz check her own understanding? And how in the world could the students learn content that neither one of them understood well? Raising questions about her subject matter understanding as a teacher became a mentoring move that enabled Liz to slow down and consider her own uncertainties. Expressing and exploring her own confusions, particularly around science content she herself had taught earlier, represented a shift in how Sandy viewed herself as a mentor and how she enacted that role. When I interviewed Sandy nearly a month after this co-observation I asked Sandy what she had originally thought it would mean to be a CT when she first agreed to become one. Sandy initially believed she was supposed to have all the answers. Otherwise, her intern might question Sandy’s ability to teach her. I was thinking that I should know all the answers, that I was supposed to be this great teacher who would instill wisdom in her. Initially, if I didn’t know the answer or if I was stumbling myself, I would feel embarrassed to have her see me going through that, thinking well she’s probably wondering ‘What have I got myself into? This teacher doesn’t even know.’ (interview, 3-16-99) Worried that her own questions might give her intern the impression that Sandy did not know what she was doing, Sandy seemed to believe that mentoring was about “instill[ing] wisdom” rather than learning together. Rather than acting as the all-knowing evaluator who simply told Liz what had gone well and what needed improvement, Sandy adopted a more inquiry-oriented disposition during the second co-observation, a stance that I had tried to model. “An Unskilled Person Teaching an Unskilled Person”: A Second Portrait (1999) Our joint work with Liz during the 1998-99 school year led Sandy to revise her initial belief that interns were “highly skilled people.” “I have come to realize that they 189 are indeed students with a lot of learning still to do” (interview, 3-16-99). Sandy also reshaped her beliefs about her mentoring role. In both co-observations, I had repeatedly raised questions about what the students had learned by engaging in certain activities. In the second co-observation, Sandy began to raise similar questions. Toward the end of the school year, Sandy noted the importance of raising such questions about the fit between purpose and activity before her intern taught. Thus Sandy gained insight into the importance of helping interns prepare for teaching. Nearly a month after the second co-observation, Sandy acknowledged the difficulty she had experienced in looking beyond activities Liz had planned. I don’t know if I’m stretching Liz to put the thought into the lessons that needs to be there. If the objective is the children will know that sounds are made in waves or whatever, I’m not saying ‘Now wait. Let’s look at this part of the lesson. Is this addressing this objective?’ I think when I look through I’m saying ‘Oh, this is cool! They’re getting to use tuning forks.’ I’m not looking at each piece and saying how does that address the objective? I’m more apt to cross my fingers and say ‘Boy, I hope at the end of this lesson they know that vibrations make sounds.’ (interview, 3-16-99) Sandy recognized that she needed to help Liz explore the fit between activities and objectives, noting that her previous strategy of crossing her fingers, hoping that the students somehow “got it” by the end of the lesson provided insufficient support to Liz. Moreover, Sandy connected Liz’s struggle to plan with Sandy’s own vulnerability as an instructional planner. When I mentioned that Liz seemed to plan in terms of activities rather than carefully considering what she wants students to learn from those activities, Sandy quickly responded. That’s because she was showing you what’s been modeled for her... I was always like, ‘Oh, let’s paint pretty pictures.’ So that’s what I really need to work on. You know, this is the objective. How are we going to make sure that they learn this? And how are we going to assess it at the end to be really sure that they have it?. .. So maybe I need to get better at writing lesson plans. I think she’s seen a lot of ‘Oh, that’s a cute activity! I love it. Let’s do that’ and everyone’s happy, stirring their ice cream and eating it. (interview, 3-16-99) I90 Sandy linked Liz’s propensity to plan in terms of activities rather than students’ learning to Sandy’s own activity-driven stance when planning, choosing lessons that are “cute” and make the kids “happy” without attending to what students may or may not learn from their engagement in such activities. Seeing the parallels between Liz’s and her own approach to planning helped Sandy recognize that in order to become a stronger teacher of planning, she needed to strengthen her capacity as an instructional planner. Maybe you can sit in while we plan. Then you can even ask me probing questions and walk me through it, because this is like an unskilled person teaching an unskilled person. I’ve got to have some of the tools. And I can say to the intern ‘You know what? I’m learning right along with you and I want to get better at doing this, too. And Pat is so talented at this, she’s going to help me.’ ...If you can get me to think at a deeper level, then maybe from that experience I can learn in turn [how] to get them to think at a deeper level. (interview, 3-16-99) In demonstrating her openness to rethinking aspects of her teaching, Sandy acknowledged that her activity-oriented approach to planning meant that she was “an unskilled person teaching an unskilled person.” After inviting me to help her strengthen her instructional planning, Sandy considered how she would explain my presence in future planning sessions to the following year’s intern. By telling her intern that she was “learning right along with [her],” Sandy seemed to legitimize her role not only as a teacher to the intern but as a learner of teaching and mentoring herself. Getting Off to a Rocky Start in Year Three Sandy had significantly reshaped her understanding of mentoring in the two years she had served as a collaborating teacher. I had been thrilled with Sandy’s invitation to help her become a stronger instructional planner and teacher of planning. When Sharon, David Carroll and I developed a research project designed to capture and study images of strong mentoring and learning to mentor, I thought Sandy would be a perfect participant 191 for the study. She agreed to let me videotape her ongoing work with her third intern, Sue, during the 1999-2000 school year. When I began taping that fall, I had assumed Sandy would welcome my efforts to help her with planning even though we had not explicitly discussed what that would look like. In early October, Sandy and Sue met to begin planning a two-week literacy unit Sue wanted to teach. Initially I stayed behind the video camera, simply taping their conversation. Sue said she wanted the students to become “more expressive in their writing” (planning session, 10-12-00). Later she stated that she wanted to use a number of Eric Carle’s books to help students learn about the “beginning, middle and end” of stories. Sandy and Sue then began looking through Carle’s books, considering how Sue might use the books to teach beginning, middle and end. As I listened to them discuss possible ideas for an author study, I worried that both Sue and Sarah were prematurely focusing on activities rather than big ideas they would want students to learn. Anxious to step in and support Sandy, I inserted myself into their conversation. First, I asked Sue a series of questions about what she meant by the students becoming more expressive in their writing. Once she had clarified these goals, I pressed her to consider whether and how a study of Carle’s books would help the students learn those objectives. Aware that the conversation had been challenging for all three of us, I nonetheless left feeling excited that we had begun to grapple with difficult questions for which there were no easy answers. I was particularly pleased that I was able to model for Sandy ways to help Sue explore the fit between purposes and possible activities, something Sandy had identified as a weakness in her own planning. 192 Sandy and Sue, however, did not share my sense of excitement. Sue went home and abandoned the author study altogether, instead deciding to teach an “introductory” unit on story elements. She later explained that because this was “only an introduction” to setting, characters and plot, her objectives were simply to “expose” children to these terms. Sandy emailed me to share how “overwhehned” she felt. If our planning sessions lasted as long as this one just had, she would be unable to remain in the project. When I agreed to be part of the study, I thought you would tape lessons and meetings that Sue and l naturally have during and after school. If you are comfortable with keeping with that impression then tape away! ...You would be getting our meetings as they really occur - for better or worse! Sarah and I welcome the chance to “share.” Otherwise, you might want to ask another teacher/intern pair to take our place. (e-mail, 10-12-99) While I saw Sandy’s participation in the project as an opportunity to support her learning to mentor, Sandy assumed that I would simply videotape her work with Sue -- “for better or worse” -- rather than intervene. Mortified that my first attempt to help Sandy help Sue had resulted in their desire to pull out of the project, I realized that I would need to think much more carefully about how I could assist Sandy’s performance. For the remainder of that fall semester, I did little more than videotape Sandy’s work with Sue. That winter, however, as Sandy and I considered how we might turn these videotapes into records of practice to use in the CT study group, new opportunities arose. I suggested that before using a record of practice Sandy and I should analyze it together. In January I began taping a series of sessions where Sandy helped Sue plan a two-week science unit “from scratch.” Immediately following each session, I made a transcript of the conversation which Sandy and I jointly analyzed. We then developed a focus for future planning sessions with Sue before sharing the record in the study group. 193 This cycle of planning, analyzing the conversation and preparing for the next planning session became a powerful form of mentor development for Sandy. Studying transcripts of the planning sessions helped Sandy identify patterns in her responses to Sue that kept Sue from “getting below the surface” of the content she was planning to teach. Developing new ways to guide and support Sue’s planning turned out to be more difficult than Sandy had anticipated. “We’re not on the Same Page”: The First Planning Session around Sue’s Plant Unit Before Sandy and Sue met to begin officially planning Sue’s two-week science unit, they had decided that the unit would focus on plants. Sue wanted to try to teach the unit using a constructivist approach she had been learning about through her university coursework. Acting on the advice of her university science instructor, Sue had begun to gather resources. She brought a dozen books about plants and a short list of web site addresses to their initial planning session which lasted about thirty minutes. Summary of the planning session. Sue first explained that while her “overlying theme” was plants, she wanted to explore two related aspects: plant growth and plant uses. She believed students should understand that plants need sun, water and soil in order to grow. Sue then described some “cool experiments” she had come across in a book such as depriving plants of sunlight and growing plants from seeds in baggies “so you can see the roots and learn that that’s how they get their food and stuff like that.” After learning about plant growth, Sue thought the students could study how we use plants such as for food. She picked up a book devoted to this topic, stating, “I’d never even thought [of] how many things we eat. We use roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits, cereal, grain.” When Sue explained that she might have small groups investigate a 194 particular kind of plant part we eat, Sandy interjected, “That’s a concept they probably don’t really understand,” explaining that students “don’t know where their food comes from other than the grocery store.” After agreeing, Sue continued sharing ideas for human and animal uses of plants such as shelter and clothing. She explained that “basically, I would just take all this information and sort of give an introduction.” Sandy then asked Sue what she had learned from her informal assessment of a dozen of their students. Sue reported that all but two had known that “plants are living.” Sandy warned Sue that simply because the students answered correctly did not mean that they really understood what it meant for plants to be alive. Sue agreed that this should be “the biggest part of the unit,” but she was having difficulty “trying to make a time line.” She figured that studying what plants need in order to grow might take a week or two then added that plant “uses [will] be just an introductory thing.” Sandy responded that since plants are not included in the first grade science curriculum, Sue needed to consider “what’s important for the students to know.” Sue had reviewed the state science curriculum standards and felt the unit could address the idea of “interdependence and interrelationships.” Consulting a text, Sue read, “Relationships between plants and animals and ecosystems... and symbiotic relationships such as insects and flowering plants, birds eating fruit and spreading seeds.” Sandy responded that if Sue was “thinking of birds and wind spreading seeds,” Sue would have to address how plants grow, not just what they need for growth. Sue wanted “to try to work that into [the unit] a little bit” but was not sure how. She thought she might teach plant grth through a web site she had found where “a fruit has a seed in it and a bird 195 eats it and then whatever,” not really finishing her thought. Sandy responded positively, stating “that would be good for them to look at.” Sandy then wondered if “carrots have seeds in them” and if all plants grow from seeds. Sue reached for a book, explaining that it contained “a lot of neat activities” about growing different plants from seeds. Sandy continued with her question about seeds: Sandy: So potato farmers, they plant seeds? They plant -- I don’t know. Sue: I don’t know enough yet. I’m still investigating. Sandy: Because I’m thinking you can’t see them. No, but you buy carrot seeds and plant those... Once we put a potato in the dirt and when we pulled it out later there were little roots down, little potatoes. Sue: I was so surprised when I was looking through these books last night. I never knew that potatoes are part of the stem. You know what I mean? Sandy: I thought they were part of the root. Sue: Maybe it was root. [consulting book] It says in here, that it’s part of the stem. All those little scars are like where the buds are. Did you know that? Sandy: Actually, this might be more important to spend time on than incidental [things], like what part of the plant are you eating when you eat it because it’s real life for them. Sue: That’s why I thought this [book] was so cool. This is a little advanced and I’d really have to go through it but like a radish is a root. It goes through and says a carrot is a root. Sandy: That would be interesting to say ‘have you eaten any roots this week?’ because I don’t think there is that understanding. They think potatoes are from Meijers. In the midst of their discussion of whether or not potatoes are considered roots or stems, Sandy suggested that Sue might want to focus her plant unit on the parts of plants we eat “because it’s real life” for their students. After sharing her current thinking, Sue said, “I don’t know if you have any [suggestions]. I mean, this is so sketchy.” Sandy replied that Sue was “doing a good job of finding resources.” Sue proceeded to show Sandy another book from an 196 environmental course Sue had taken that was full of “activities about trees and interrelationships and stuff that would be kind of cool to do.” Sandy reiterated, “You’ve got a good start... You’ve put a lot of work into this,” then offered some suggestions for further resources Sue might track down. Sue repeated her sense of uncertainty how long the unit might take. Sandy encouraged her to apply the rule that “less is more. Better to really learn that topic,” and then wrapped up the planning session by saying, “Well, it sounds like you know where you’re going with it. I would just try to come up with overlying purposes. What concept do I want the kids to understand?” Debriefing the planning session. Before meeting with Sandy to analyze the session, I had asked if she wanted to focus on anything in particular. She wanted “to get better at asking questions... [and] knowing how to follow up a question of Sue’s with a question to get her to do the thinking rather than just telling the answer” (e-mail, 1-27- 00). When we met, I suggested that we study the transcript I had made, paying attention to what we were learning about Sue as a planner and what we noticed about how Sandy supported her. Before we turned our attention to the transcript, Sandy explained, I had gone into this planning session thinking I’m really going to concentrate on asking questions. But she was so prepared that I didn’t see a lot of places where I could jump in with a question. In just two day’s time, she had already fleshed out a lot [of the unit]. But there’s got to be some way to do that, and that’s what I would like to get better at. (planning session analysis, 1-31-00) I asked Sandy if anything else had surprised her about the conversation. Sandy reiterated how surprised she was that Sue had the unit already “well thought out.” This surprised me. I thought Sue lacked a clear direction for the unit or a sense about how the various activities she had proposed added up to a coherent sequence. Sue herself had stated that she felt her plans were “sketchy” and seemed unsure where to go next. At the time, I kept this assessment to myself. 197 Directing our attention to the transcript, I noted that in Sue’s opening turn, she laid out several resources she had gathered and some possible activities for the unit. I began reading the part where Sandy had raised concerns about students not understanding that much of the food we eat comes from plants. Sandy quickly noticed, “But she barrels on. I hadn’t seen that until now. It’s like she has an agenda and she’s barreling ahead without stopping.” I agreed, pointing out another place where Sue quickly dismissed Sandy’s comment that Sue would have to teach how plants grow in order to meet the “interdependence and interrelationship” objectives Sue had named. Sandy replied, “So it’s not really a conversation. She’s not thoughtful about what I’m saying.” I then pointed out another place where Sandy had focused their conversation on content knowledge by asking whether all plants grow from seeds. I connected this move to our debriefing session with Liz where we had tried to “slow her down and think about what she really understood about the content.” I hypothesized that whether she realized it, Sandy seemed to have an agenda to help Sue “get inside” the subject matter. Sandy replied, “It’s intuitive. My curiosity came out because I was starting to think about what she was talking about. She got me thinking.” I said that sharing her own questions about the content was an important mentoring move. I also said that when Sue claimed that most of the students knew that plants are living, Sandy questioned whether the students really understood what that meant. Pat: You challenged her that they might not know why. You draw her attention to the kids’ understanding. It reminded me of the work we did with Liz where she thought that if they could say the right answer, they knew it. Sandy: Yeah, you’ll pour water on a table and two minutes later it’s gone. And you’ll say, ‘what happened?’ and they’ll say ‘it evaporated.’ But do they know what evaporated is? Just because people come up with the right answers doesn’t mean the understanding is there. I98 In noting that Sandy had challenged Sue’s assumption that students understood plants are alive, I connected her work with Sue to our joint work with Liz where we had tried to help her consider what counts as evidence of student understanding. In both situations, Sandy had shared the same anecdote about her students’ ability to use the term evaporation without being able to explain what it means. After reading aloud another transcript segment, I talked about “Sue as a planner,” connecting her approach to developing this plant unit with an earlier literacy unit. Pat: Here’s what I’m learning about Sue as a planner. When she was designing her literacy unit, I think it was easy for her to say ‘I just want to give them a general overview. I don’t expect them to be able to demonstrate that they know all those different story elements.’ Sandy: That makes it easier for her. She doesn’t have to know whether she’s taught anything or not. Pat: And if she lacks deep subject matter understanding, who cares? She’s not trying to give it to them... In this conversation, too, she says it’s just going to be an introductory thing. And she’s talked a lot about different activities she could do. But I was sort of wondering, what’s her big idea? When I mentioned that Sue seemed to fall back on the notion of “introducing” content rather than clarifying what exactly she wanted students to learn, Sandy realized this stance let Sue off the hook in terms of assessing children’s understanding. When I replied that it also meant Sue did not have to strengthen her own subject matter knowledge, Sandy recognized that she needed to help Sue increase her “background knowledge.” Sandy: I’m thinking when I’m questioning her ideas, that can really serve as a tool to have a conversation -- a back and forth -- about her background knowledge. And my purpose really has to be when she says ‘yeah, but’ to say ‘Now wait a minute, though. Let’s continue to look at this aspect.’ Instead, she barrels ahead and then I’m just like, ‘okay.’ Pat: I face the same struggle when I plan with interns. I feel like I’m reacting to whatever they bring to the table. It’s very hard for me to think hey, I could be proactive here and rather than say ‘walk me through what you’ve brought,’ 1 could say, ‘Tell me about what you’re learning about plants’ as my opening move. 199 Sandy: That’s a whole different way of opening it up. It’s already heading the conversation in a different direction. My inclination is to say I want her to be successful and she’s so excited, she’s done all this stuff, I don’t want to burst her bubble because she’s on a roll. But I need to think of myself as a teacher. Rather than ‘good for you, great job, sounds like you’ve done tons of work,’ say ‘but wait a minute. Let’s talk about this more.’ That’s a whole other concept beyond this questioning versus telling that I hadn’t thought about before. Sandy recognized that her desire not to squelch Sue’s enthusiasm by “questioning her ideas” kept the two of them from having a serious “back and forth” conversation. Sandy further acknowledged that to be Sue’s “teacher,” Sandy had to do more than respond positively to Sue’s efforts. She must address Sue’s “background knowledge,” an idea Sandy “hadn’t thought about before.” Wanting to build on Sandy’s insight that she might need to do more than respond positively to Sue’s ideas, I asked Sandy how she might structure and focus their planning time differently so that Sandy could help Sue build her content knowledge. Sandy replied, “I’m thinking I can’t think of what I should say to come up with an agenda!” Sandy recognized that she had simply responded to the agenda Sue sets. “To come up with an agenda” of her own, Sandy would have to know Sue well enough to determine areas for further growth; she admitted, however, that she currently did not know what to say to frame their conversations. Her candid response revealed that she was gaining new insights into the challenge of helping an intern learn to plan. Sandy further noted that having a transcript made it easier to identify places where she could have responded differently. It’s much easier once you’ve transcribed this to say ‘Boy, I should have done more here.’ I may hear or get one thing out of it and she may get something else, and we’re not on the same page. So the struggle is to learn how to do that when you’re immersed in the conversation. You’ve got to slow down the pace because otherwise when someone’s talking, you’re reacting with how you’re going to answer and you’re not truly hearing what they’re saying. 200 Sandy identified the challenge of figuring out how to respond in the moment to Sue’s ideas and questions in ways that further her understanding and growth. When she listens to Sue, Sandy realized, she’s thinking more about “how [she’s] going to answer,” leaving her unable to “truly hear” what Sue is saying. I responded by offering a strategy I had picked up from another teacher. During discussions, the teacher takes notes on the students’ ideas. If she can’t keep up with them, then the conversation is going too fast and she asks the students to slow down. I suggested that Sandy “try to jot down what Sue’s saying, and if you feel like it’s going too fast, you could say, ‘Let’s slow down a minute here.”’ Sandy agreed she should try to take notes during their next conversation, remarking that she constantly takes anecdotal notes of her young students. She wondered why she had never thought to take notes when working with Sue. In terms of next steps, Sandy recognized that the way she ended the planning session, asking Sue to come up with overlying purposes, gave her clues about where to begin their next conversation. By clarifying the big ideas for the unit, I pointed out that Sandy could also assess Sue’s content knowledge. Armed with a notebook and pen, Sandy planned to ask Sue what she wanted the students to understand by the end of the unit. I suggested that she might even ask Sue to develop a chart listing all of the different foods we eat and what part of a plant they come from to help Sue “organize what she knows.” Analysis of debriefing session. Our conversation seemed to help Sandy re- envision her mentoring role. She had approached this planning session with a focus on her performance, hoping to question more and “tell” less. Yet during the session, she thought that questioning Sue about the content would “burst [Sue’s] bubble.” As we 201 analyzed the transcript together, Sandy acknowledged that she simply responded to what Sue brought to the table. However, as Sue’s teacher, Sandy needed to take responsibility for directing their planning conversations in ways that furthered Sue’s subject matter understanding. Sandy saw that beyond questioning, her real challenge lay in being responsive to Sue in the moment in ways that furthered her learning. Identifying this challenge suggested that we might have reached a greater shared understanding of what lies at the heart of good teaching and mentoring. Thoughtful mentoring involves more than questioning the novice. It requires the mentor to listen to what the novice says, assess her understanding in that instant, and respond in ways that move her thinking forward based on the mentor’s goals for the intem’s learning. Sandy may have been able to gain these new insights into mentoring by the mentoring I provided her as we debriefed her planning session. First, I offered alternative interpretations of Sarah as a planner. Sandy initially felt that Sue had already “fleshed out a lot [of the unit].” I was not as impressed with Sue’s initial legwork. Like her approach to an earlier literacy unit, I believed that Sue was trying to determine a sequence of learning activities without defining what she really wanted students to learn or developing her own content knowledge. When I offered my perspective on Sue as a planner, Sandy began to notice that Sue had yet to clarify big ideas for the unit. She further recognized that Sue dismissed Sandy’s question about the content. A second strategy I used to mentor Sandy was to offer alternative moves Sandy could employ during the planning session. When Sandy realized that Sue had her own agenda and kept barreling ahead regardless of how Sandy responded, I suggested an 202 alternative way to start the conversation by asking Sue about her knowledge of the content she was planning to teach. This move would help Sandy establish a direction for the conversation (e.g. “Tell me about what you’re learning about plants”). When Sandy stated that she needed “to slow down the pace” so that she could think about how to respond to Sue, I suggested that she take notes during the conversation to help her keep track of Sue’s thinking. “Actually this is Hard and Thoughtful Work”: The Next Planning Session When Sandy, Sue and I met again several days later, Sandy had an agenda and felt prepared to help Sue clarify one or two big ideas for her plant unit. Their conversation, which lasted nearly thirty minutes, proved to be more challenging than Sandy had anticipated. Part way through, Sandy invited me to “dive in any time,” which I did. When we jointly analyzed the transcribed session several days later, Sandy uncovered even greater complexity and challenge in mentoring interns. Summary of second planning session. Sandy first noted that Sue had brought a lot of ideas and resources to their previous planning session but said that they needed “to try to narrow it down to two or three big ideas that would be appropriate for the kids to learn” (planning session, 2-3-00). After stating that her “underlying question is how do we use plants,” Sue began describing additional resource books she had located. Sue enthusiastically pointed to an illustration that explained how wheat is turned into bread, explaining that before sharing this text with the students, she would ask them “Where does bread come from?” then have students read a bread bag label to find out that wheat is in bread. Sandy wondered if perhaps Sue could “start with just a variety of fruits and 203 vegetables and say ‘Do you know where these came from?’” rather than beginning with foods “that have been refined.” Sandy then clarified, “So some of our foods come from plants would be the big idea,” returning to her original agenda. Sue, however, quickly shifted their attention back to how she would teach the unit. Alter naming a long list of processed foods that students might not realize come from plants (e.g. cereal, bread, potato chips, peanut butter, chocolate, pasta, coffee, tea, soda, Hi-C), Sue said that her real struggle lay in figuring out a sequence of lessons for the unit. She worried that if she kept asking the students to hypothesize where cereal and bread and potato chips come from then “look in the book to see how it was actually made,” she would simply “give them the same activity day after day after day after day.” She wondered how to avoid the unit becoming a repetitious “let’s made food” activity. Sandy responded by reminding Sue of an idea they had generated earlier where students could use mortars and pestles to “grind up some corn to actually see how it changes form.” Sandy noted that such an activity where students could observe the com turn into flour then use it to make corn bread was more in line with the constructivist approach Sue had wanted to use. As the conversation wore on, Sue remained determined to map out the lessons, evaluating possible activities such as growing and drying herbs and baking bread. Yet baking a number of foods left Sue feeling “like this is Cooking 101 versus science.” She surmised, “I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m having trouble with it.” Sandy waited a moment before responding. She explained that if they wanted students to understand that processed foods come from plants, Sue should “give them experiences” taking plants in their original form and turning them into refined foods. Without those 204 first-hand experiences, Sandy believed that reading a book which illustrated the refining process would not help students truly “understand.” Sue wondered what role resource books should play in students’ learning. Would reading a non-fictional text “interfere” with or “reinforce” students’ understanding? On the heels of that question, Sue wondered how to schedule activities to fill her three-week unit. Nearly twenty minutes into the planning session, Sandy responded by suggesting that they needed to determine possible big ideas for the unit. Thinking aloud with visible effort, Sandy named two. Sue: The other thing I don’t know is I have about 15 days for this. How long am I supposed to spend on cereal or whatever? Sandy: I wouldn’t even break it down into individual foods, like a cereal day or a bread day. I mean, if we can think of some big concepts. How do we use plants? We use it for food. All right, what are some important things for them to know? We use different parts of the plant to eat. Maybe, when we pick the fruit or vegetable we don’t always eat it in the same form. I mean, some big ideas like that and then if one of these activities will fit under some of the big ideas, then we’d put them in. Otherwise we rule them out. When Sue asked how long she should spend on any given activity, Sandy suggested instead that they consider what students should understand about using plants for food. Sandy proceeded to identify two big ideas -- we eat different parts of plants and we don’t always eat the plant in its original form -- explaining that once they had figured out the big ideas, they would be in a better position to determine the “fit” of particular activities. Once Sue agreed to these overarching concepts, Sue quickly turned her attention to additional uses of plants such as making clothing out of cotton. Sandy raised concerns about whether or not a study of cotton and other plant fibers would “be too abstract” for the first and second graders. Sandy liked the food aspect better because it was “more hands-on.” Sue replied, “Oh, this is so hard,” worrying that the students might think humans only use plants for food if she did not address other uses. 205 When Sue was called out of the classroom momentarily, I stepped in to confer with Sandy. I suggested that rather than debating the merits of teaching the use of plants for clothing, Sandy should push ahead with “what the food piece might look like.” Sandy quickly agreed that Sue should “concentrate on plants as food.” I advised Sandy to help Sue think about the assumptions they were making “about what kids need to know or be able to do in order to understand those big ideas.” For example, Sandy liked the idea of starting with fruits and vegetables, but do students understand that oranges come fi'om trees, a kind of plant? I encouraged Sandy to make a chart with Sue about the different plant parts that we eat before “thinking about activities.” Sandy nodded, saying, “That makes sense to me because then there’s a direction instead of floundering.”2 Debriefing the second planning session. When we met to study the transcript several days later, we noticed that as soon as Sandy laid out the agenda for their session, Sue shifted her attention to possible activities. After reading a series of turns, Sandy said, She wants the days planned. That’s what she kept coming back to. I could sense that, but [from our analysis of the last session], I knew we had skipped over background knowledge and coming up with the big ideas. So I had that in my mind and I kept trying to go back to square one that we sort of jumped over. (debriefing planning session, 2-5-00) Sandy had quickly recognized a pattern in their talk. While Sandy wanted to focus on what the students would learn, Sue concentrated on activities for the unit. I pointed out that Sandy is very responsive to Sue’s agenda while also trying to get back to her own. I encouraged Sandy to name that tension in the moment, saying to Sue, “These are 2 When Sue returned, Sandy suggested that they develop a chart, listing different foods that come from particular plant parts. Sue had to look in a book to name stem, leaf, roots, huh and flower but stated she had already developed a concept map for the unit. She then wondered how to teach plant parts. 206 important questions, but let’s put them on hold a minute.” Sandy admitted, “I don’t think I’m explicit. I want to get her on the concepts, and she’s whipping out books.” When Sandy read the transcript where Sue suggested checking bread labels to show that wheat is one of its ingredients, she described “feeling this sense of dread. I was like agh because there’s so much more you can do.” I noted that Sandy did not share these feelings or convey her concern that Sue was moving farther away from constructivist principles. Instead, Sandy suggested that Sue might start with a variety of fruits and vegetables without saying why she thought this was a good idea. I suggested an alternative response, “Why not just say, ‘I’m really surprised. We had talked about doing things where they actually take a plant and turn it into a processed food. What happened to that?”’ I pointed out that offering an alternative activity took them farther away from Sandy’s own agenda. When we read Sue’s list of processed foods that contain plants, Sandy commented, “I was thinking forget things like coffee, tea, soda. I can see apple juice or orange juice. Let’s use foods that the kids know!” I noted that while Sandy’s concern was valid, raising it with Sue again moved the conversation “back to the how part.” Sandy agreed. I then described a pattern in Sandy’s interactions with Sue. Pat: You’re incredibly responsive to Sue. It’s obvious you’re listening so carefully to what she’s saying. I’m thinking that as a teacher, it’s so natural when a child raises her hand and says, ‘At recess, can we do x and y?’ you say, ‘You know, we’re not worried about that right now. Right now we’re working on math.’ You don’t mind redirecting a child and refocusing a child, but I never see you do that here. I’m just wondering if that’s a tension for you or? Sandy: I don’t even know if it’s conscious. The conversation is so fast paced I can’t get a grip on what direction we’re going. In wondering why Sandy consistently redirected her students but failed to refocus Sue, Sandy said that their conversation was so fast paced she did not know “what direction” to 207 go in. Sandy then acknowledged that as a teacher who has “done lots of units over the years,” she has steps she follows to develop units. First she identifies a topic then generates key ideas the students should learn. Finally, she considers how to help students learn those concepts. Sandy thought that if she wrote these steps down, she could use them as a kind of agenda to help her redirect Sue. I encouraged Sandy to try this. As we read on, Sandy located more places where she was “not explicit enough” in her responses to Sue. At one point Sandy asserted, “I need to say, ‘Boy, you’ve learned lots from these books. Here, let me put those on the floor. Now let’s get back to big ideas.”’ I offered a slightly different way Sandy could refocus the conversation. Pat: Another way to be responsive is just to acknowledge her feelings. ‘I can ' tell that you’re really concerned about what this is going to look like and that’s understandable. But Sue, you’re not going to be able to figure that out until we really clarify what it is you want the kids to learn.’ Just make her understand where you’re coming from. You might also take notes every time she asks a question about the how. You could say, ‘I’m going to write that down and we’ll come back to that. But right now we’re still working on the what. We’ll worry about the how later.’ Sandy: So I’m not brushing them under the carpet. Pat: Yeah. Sue has great questions, but they make your conversation go all over the place. That might feel more empowering to you. I tried to provide Sandy with language to redirect Sue, suggesting that Sandy needed to be more understanding of Sue’s desire to map out the unit as well as more explicit about why Sandy was not going to be immediately responsive to Sue’s questions and concerns. I further suggested that Sandy jot down every idea or worry Sue shared so that they could come back to them once the key concepts had been identified. Sandy realized this strategy might feel more responsive to Sue than simply putting her books on the floor. Our analysis was interspersed with a fair bit of humor. For example, when we read Sandy’s comments about bringing in her bread machine, I asked her, “What were 208 you thinking?” Through our laughter she replied, “Listen, I’m new at this! I’ve only been at this a couple of years.” In a more sobering tone, she continued. Sandy: I’m basically mealy-mouthed. I know what I want to get back to, but instead of saying ‘Sue, Stop. Let’s do this’ I try to keep going in the back door because I’m not assertive and forceful which is curious because I am an assertive and forceful person with anyone else but not with Sue. I don’t know why that is. So that’s something I have to figure out. Pat: You’ll have to think about that. You might write on the top of your notebook Sandy: Don’t be a weenie? [laughter] Pat: No, a positive affirmation! I give myself permission to redirect her. Sandy acknowledged that while she asserts herself with others, she remains “mealy- mouthed” when talking to Sue. Sandy set a goal for herself “to figure out” why. When Sandy later worried that Sue might not react well to Sandy setting the agenda, I encouraged Sandy to explain why she wanted to help Sue plan in a different way. Sandy: I’m thinking of future meetings. We’ve set such a pattern for our meetings up to this point that it’s hard to think like whoa, all of a sudden I’m going to change the way we do business. How’s that going to go? Pat: That’s a great question. It almost seems like you would have to say what you’ve been up to, that you’ve really been studying how you help her plan. You could lay out how you’ve approached it, her bringing anything to the table and you being responsive, but that you’d really like to try something different, to set an agenda. Sandy: And then our planning would be more organized. As I spoke, Sandy took notes. Once we decided how Sandy would launch the session, we clarified an agenda. First, Sandy would ask Sue to restate what she wanted the students to learn in order to make sure that they were on the same page. Then together they would develop a pre-assessment protocol given Sue’s objectives for the unit. Finally, they would shift their attention to developing a general sequence of activities given Sue’s goals. 209 Analysis of second planning session. Returning to this planning and debriefing session nearly a year later, I was struck by how firmly Sandy had internalized the importance of attending to student learning. Even though Sandy faced enormous challenges in facilitating the conversation, she remained committed to clarifying what they wanted the students to learn. In addition, when evaluating Sue’s ideas for particular activities, Sandy consistently gauged whether and how the activities would support children in truly understanding the big ideas she had named. For example, when Sue suggested sharing a book about how wheat is turned into bread, Sandy later explained, “You can’t just read a book that says ‘it goes in the machine then comes out’ because they may be able to spew the information back but do they understand it?” Sandy had adopted this lens I had modeled and she had “tried on” when analyzing Liz’s teaching to serve as a central focus of her planning with Sue. In terms of the mentoring I provided Sandy, I made explicit suggestions about what Sandy might do and say in her next meeting with Sue. In particular I encouraged her to be more explicit with Sue about how she was thinking and feeling about Sue’s ideas and questions. I also tried to provide Sandy with specific language she might use. For example, when Sandy wondered what might happen if she structured the planning meeting rather than allowing Sue to set the agenda, I did a “think aloud” about what she might say to help Sue understand why Sandy was focusing the conversation. Furthermore, when Sandy stated that she might simply take Sue’s books and place them on the floor, I suggested that she acknowledge Sue’s pressing need to map out the unit before asking her to set the books aside so that they could first clarify the big ideas. 210 In addition to suggesting specific moves and offering actual language Sandy might use, I posed analytic questions, much the way I do in debriefing conferences with interns. For example, I wondered why Sandy seemed so willing to redirect her students yet appeared so reluctant to refocus Sue. Sandy emailed me several days later with a further response to that question. I really asked myself why I AM so proactive and assertive with my students, family, fiiends, and colleagues but uncomfortable doing it with Sue. I really came up with no good answer other than maybe it’s because I want her to perceive me as nurturing and helpful. But when I allow her to flounder and give no clear direction when she’s obviously asking for one, I’m NOT nurturing and supporting her. Some of the fear may be that I’M unclear as to the next step to take. You make it look so easy, Pat, but it’s actually very hard and thoughtful work. (e-mail, 2-8-00) In trying to figure out why she feels so uncomfortable being proactive with Sue, Sandy first wondered if perhaps she wanted Sue to view her as being helpful. Yet Sandy recognized that without providing guidance, she was failing to support and nurture Sue by simply responding to Sue’s agenda. This insight led Sandy to consider that her lack of assertiveness might be the result of her uncertainty about “next steps.” Once Sandy realized that there are no easy answers in mentoring, that “actually this is very hard and thoughtful work,” our joint mentoring work began in earnest. I continued to tape her planning sessions with Sue but freely stepped in and out of the conversations, openly helping Sandy stick to her agenda while remaining responsive to Sue. As Sue began to develop individual lesson plans for the plant unit, Sandy and I often met to analyze them together before jointly discussing possible revisions with Sue. When Sue taught her science unit, Sandy and I co-observed many lessons, making time to discuss what we noticed before jointly leading the debriefing conferences with Sue where we helped her analyze her practice and consider ways to revise tomorrow’s plans based on what had occurred that day. 211 From “Support Person” to “Teacher of Teachers”: A Recent Portrait (2000) Three years after becoming a collaborating teacher, Sandy described her evolving understanding of her mentoring role by drawing parallels between teaching children and teaching interns. She realized that her beliefs about how to support children’s learning (e. g. modeling, explaining as she models, pointing out to students what they are doing) should also inform her work with interns. Rather than assuming that her intern can automatically notice teaching moves Sandy makes and simply imitate them, Sandy now recognizes she must constantly talk to her intern as she teaches, explaining the hows and whys. With the students in my room, I’m very careful about modeling the behaviors I want them to copy, speaking out loud about what I’m modeling and then as I see them replicating that modeling, pointing out to them what they’re using. With Sue, I thought the modeling was there because from day one she saw me working with the kids. But I missed the step that maybe you should do with everyone whether they’re six or whether they’re twenty which is explaining as I was modeling what I was doing and the why, and pointing out to her when she was doing it... Rather than seeing myself as a teacher of teachers, I saw myself as sort of the support person. (interview, 6-8-00) In reflecting on the challenges involved in moving from a “support person” to a teacher of teaching, Sandy recognized that she intervenes with her students, confronting or correcting them as needed because she clearly knows what she wants her students to learn. Lacking such a clear blueprint for her intem’s learning, Sandy was less willing and able to step in and direct Sue’s planning and teaching. Instead, she fell back on the false assumption that since interns have graduated from college they simply need a classroom to try out what they already knew. I’m not afraid to correct or confront the little kids because I’m invested in their learning. I have goals for them. I know where I want them to be and I say we’re going to go through these steps to get there. Why is this so hard to do with interns? For some reason, I perceived them as sort of “there,” and I’m giving them this classroom to use as a laboratory to try things out. I really need to have said given my goals and how I perceive this person, what are the steps I need to go through to get her there? I didn’t have any steps written 212 down, even in here [points to her head]. What I need to do -- and it needs to be put on paper; it can’t be vague ideas in my head -- is to come up with a list of things that I really consider important, then say what is a logical sequence for learning these? (interview, 6-8-00) Sandy now recognizes that to teach an intern, she first must clarify what she expects the intern to learn. Then she can “come up with a sequence” to help the intern learn. Without those goals and steps, Sandy was unwilling to “confront” or “correct” her intern. During the summer of 2000, Sandy constructed a “personal” learning to teach curriculum for her newest intern (see Appendix G). By clarifying how she guides, supports and assesses children ’s learning across the year, she then considered how she could use those aspects of her teaching practice to guide her intem’s learning to teach. 3 For example, in September, Sandy identified assessment as a key focus for the intem’s learning, specifically how Sandy uses a variety of assessment tools (e.g. reading inventories, running records, anecdotal notes, reading checklists) to identify specific literacy skills each child already possesses or needs support in developing. In November, Sandy focuses on parent conferences including how to use students’ portfolios and other artifacts to document growth, how to facilitate student-led conferences, and how to be honest with parents about concerns while remaining positive. Sandy has relied on this curriculum to guide and assess her mentoring efforts with her fourth intern during the 2000-2001 school year. 3 Sandy had attended study group sessions/summer institutes where Team One laid out a sequence of learning Opportunities for interns across the school year. Sandy adopted this sequence when developing her personal learning to teach curriculum. What is so impressive is that Sandy personalized the team’s suggestions, mapping out how an intern could learn these aspects of teaching in Sandy ’s classroom. 213 Toward a Grounded Theory of Mentored Learning to Mentor Sandy made significant changes in understanding her mentoring role and developing her practice. She learned that interns are not professional colleagues but students of teaching. This insight led Sandy to refrarne her identity as a mentor, moving away from the notion of being a “support person” or cheerleader to becoming “a teacher of teachers.” As a teacher of teaching, Sandy realized that she needed to assess and strengthen her intem’s subject matter knowledge. She also recognized that she needed to take responsibility for framing an agenda for their joint work rather than simply responding to what her intern brought to the table. This understanding helped Sandy uncover her own vulnerabilities as a mentor. Specifically, she lacked a blueprint for “what” Sue needed to learn and an understanding of “how” to facilitate and enable that learning. When Sandy identified core challenges she faced in supporting Sue’s learning, challenges that lie at the heart of thoughtful teaching and mentoring, Sandy developed a deeper understanding that mentoring “is hard and thoughtful work.” In addition to these insights into her role, Sandy expanded her mentoring repertoire. She acquired a new lens for making sense of her intem’s teaching. Initially Sandy had analyzed Liz’s practice by focusing on Liz’s performance and issues of classroom management. The following year when we observed and analde Sue’s teaching of her plant unit, Sandy framed her analysis in terms of students’ learning. Sandy also developed a more analytic, less evaluative stance when holding debriefing conferences. Rather than relying on a mode of telling her intern what she had done well, Sandy raised questions to help her intern analyze her practice. In addition, she developed tools for directing their planning sessions (e.g. taking notes, stating her agenda), tools 214 designed to help Sandy really hear what her intern was saying and to stay focused as she developed her capacity to respond to her intern in ways that furthered her learning. The changes that Sandy made in her mentoring practice largely resulted from gaining a deeper understanding of her teaching practice. Once Sandy acknowledged that she attended to students’ outward behavior rather than their intellectual engagement in her own teaching, she understood why she tended to focus on “the big picture” when assessing Liz’s lessons. When Sandy recognized that she was “activity-driven” in her own planning, she came to understand that she had unknowingly promoted this stance in Liz because that is what Sandy had modeled. In an effort to strengthen her capacity as an instructional planner, Sandy began to pay closer attention to the fit between purposes and activities, asking herself whether and how a particular activity might enable student learning. Subsequently, Sandy deepened her mentoring practice by posing similar questions when planning with her intern. In this sense, developing her mentoring practice actually became a tool for developing her teaching practice. What enabled Sandy to make these significant changes in her understanding of mentoring and teaching? How did Sandy get to the place where she could construct a detailed curriculum of learning to teach in her own classroom? I would argue that “what” Sandy learned about mentoring is intimately intertwined with “how” she learned. In essence, she learned many of the things I modeled through our joint mentoring work (see figure 1). The circles represent our joint work while the boxes indicate specific moves 1 made to support Sandy’s learning to mentor. In terms of co-observations, Sandy and I jointly observed Liz teach (e.g. left-hand circle), taking notes in order to capture the lesson for later analysis. Over time Sandy and 215 Grounding talk in record of practice Identifying challenges Making sense of planning session or co- observation Stepping in, stepping out Assuming analytic stance Considering the learners, not just the teacher or mentor Teaching or mentoring Clarifying event goals - 5 Constructing Capturing the E a plan action for later 3 analysis : l Suggesting Offering 3 specific moves language On-stage action E Behind-the-scenes work Figure l: A Model of Mentored Learning to Mentor 216 I stepped in and out of the intem’s teaching to support her efforts to guide children’s learning. Afterwards, we met “behind the scenes” to make sense of the intern’s lesson. I attempted to ground our conversation in the notes we had taken as we identified challenges the intern faced in teaching the lesson. In doing so, I modeled different interpretive lenses such as considering evidence of students’ learning and a more analytic, less evaluative stance toward making sense of the intem’s teaching. After analyzing the lesson, Sandy and l constructed a plan for the debriefing conference. I often suggested goals for the conversation such as helping Liz consider the relationship between the pace of her lesson and missed learning opportunities. I also clarified specific questions I intended to ask Liz. This conversation led us back to the “on-stage action,” the debriefing conference, where together Sandy and I engaged Liz in an analysis of her teaching. The co-observations created a kind of “mental playgroun ” where Sandy could explore her own uncertainties about the content as well as what students learned from their engagement in activities Liz had led. Over time, Sandy recognized that rather than waiting to support Liz after she taught, she needed to guide Liz’s efforts to prepare for teaching. But Sandy quickly acknowledged that becoming a teacher of planning meant that Sandy first had to develop her capacity as an instructional planner; otherwise it was “like an unskilled person teaching an unskilled person.” The mentored learning to mentor model also describes our co-planning work. Sandy first held a planning session with Sue. I stepped in and out of the conversation to support Sandy while capturing their session on video. Later, Sandy and I analyzed the planning session using a transcript to ground our conversation. Again, I assumed an 217 analytic stance in these debriefing sessions, helping Sandy consider not only her mentoring moves but what we were learning about Sue as a learner of planning. In addition, we identified key challenges that Sandy faced in supporting Sue’s planning. Finally, Sandy and I constructed a plan for her next session with Sue, clarifying goals for her planning and mapping out particular moves Sandy could make to help Sue reach those goals. In addition, I suggested specific language Sandy might use to support Sue’s learning. As Sandy then facilitated another planning session with my support, the process repeated itself. This cyclical joint work supported Sandy in engaging in the same kinds of analytic tasks I hoped over time she would engage her intern in. For example, Sandy learned how to help her intern analyze and learn from her teaching not only from our co- observations where we worked together to make sense of the lesson and lead a debriefing conference but from having the opportunity to experience first-hand learning from her own mentoring practice. Reading the transcript together, posing analytic questions, offering alternative moves she could have made, puzzling about her intern as a learner of planning -- these were the same aspects of her mentoring practice Sandy needed to develop in order to help her intern analyze and learn from her teaching. In addition, jointly constructing a plan for her continued planning sessions with Sue paralleled the kind of planning I hoped Sandy would engage Sue in. We first had to figure out where Sue was as a learner of planning in relation to what we believed she needed to learn. Once we had identified goals, we developed specific moves Sandy could make to support and stretch Sue’s thinking and learning. When Sandy met with Sue, she needed to help Sue clarify what she wanted students to learn, figure out what students 218 already understood about the content, and determine specific activities that could enable that learning. In this sense, our joint mentoring work defined both “what” Sandy learned and “how” she learned it. While my work with Sandy is largely a success story, it is important to note that the five other collaborating teachers with whom I worked did not make the kind of strides Sandy did in understanding their mentoring role and developing their practice. Nor did they receive the level of support I offered Sandy through our joint efforts to help her interns learn. One of the greatest challenges I faced in assisting Sandy’s performance was the complicated, labor-intensive nature of the work. Not only was I trying to guide, support and assess her interns’ learning but Sandy’s mentoring as well. Mentoring Sandy through co-observations led us to realize that we held differing views about teaching, learning and mentoring. Over time, we had to work hard to develop a shared vision for the kinds of learning opportunities we wanted to provide interns, ones that we hoped the interns in turn would provide for children. This complex agenda was made all the more challenging by the fact that working on Sandy’s mentoring then implicated her teaching. In retrospect, I realize that like experienced teachers who face the challenge of accessing and articulating their practical knowledge to novices, I struggled to articulate my practical knowledge of mentoring to Sandy. For example, when observing an intem’s teaching, I believe in the importance of taking descriptive notes in order to ground later analytic conversation in what was said and done. However, it had not occurred to me to make that mentoring move (e.g. “capturing the action”) explicit to Sandy. Moreover, when debriefing lessons with interns, I push them to consider students’ learning, not just their teaching performance. Again, I never actually mentioned to Sandy that I focus on 219 students’ learning nor why I do so. Just as Sandy had to learn to be more explicit and direct with Sue, I now understand that I, too, needed to be much more explicit and direct with Sandy about what I was trying to help her learn. Neither one of us could do so until we first figured out what we were trying to teach our learner. 220 Chapter Six The (Im)possible Task of Mentor Teacher Development The previous three data chapters chronicled my efforts to make sense of and learn from my experiences as an emergent mentor teacher developer. Who I was as the researched/researcher, what the CTs and I brought to this joint work, and the school context in which our work was embedded all shaped the findings of this study. Beyond offering rich narrative accounts and subsequent analyses which provide an insider’s view of the challenges I faced in working with a group of collaborating teachers, what makes this self-study “research?” Self-study becomes research when it contains “an important relationship between personal growth and understanding and public discourse about that understanding” (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001). Exposing one’s personal experiences and their embedded challenges becomes research when and only when they connect to and illuminate the issues and troubles of some larger community. In this chapter I step back from the immediacy of my practice as a mentor teacher developer to consider connections to and implications for teacher education. Conceptualizing the Complex Territory of Mentor Teacher Development This research begins to illuminate the overwhelming task facing mentor teacher developers in building collaborating teachers’ capacity to assist novices in supporting children’s learning. As the previous data chapters illustrate, mentor developers must not only know three separate yet related practices -- teaching students, teaching interns and teaching mentors -- but be able to draw on their knowledge of each of these complicated 221 practices simultaneously. It’s hard enough just learning how to teach well, let alone knowing how to help a novice learn the practice of teaching. For the mentor developer, however, there is a further layer of complexity -- the practice of professional development -- of knowing how to help a classroom teacher become a teacher of teaching. Figure 1 depicts the three practices embedded in mentor teacher development where different teachers are working with different students to learn different curricula. University teacher educator Mentor Teacher ’ I’ “ I \ , \ I \ ’ \ I \ I ‘\ I I \ I \ ’ \ I’ \\ ,’ Teacher ‘\ /’ Candidate \ I \\ I” fAL'X \\ I f \ \ I I’ \ I ' "x \ I it” \ \ \ I, ’I .‘s \ I I’ \ \ I ,I’ x \\ I, I! \ \ [I f \ \\ I I,” \ \\ I, \ ,’ Students School content \\ I I’ \\\ ’ \ I, \ -------------------------------------------------- \ Teacher candidate Practice of Teaching Mentor teacher Practice of Mentoring Figure 1: The Interrelated Teaching Practices of Mentor Teacher Development 222 At the center of mentor teacher development lies the practice of teaching. As chapter five illustrated, Sandy’s intern, Liz, supported children’s learning. Liz acted as the “teacher,” helping the children who were the students learn the school cuniculum. She did so by preparing for instruction and carrying out planned lessons. She tried to attend to what the students did and said, but tuning into their ideas proved to be a challenge for Liz. Thus while Liz was a teacher, she was also a learner of teaching. To support and guide her efforts to help children learn, the practice of mentoring came into play. Here Sandy, her CT, served as the teacher, Liz became the student and the content she needed to learn was the practice of teaching. Thus in the middle triangle (e.g. the practice of mentoring) the mentor grounds her attempts to assist the intern’s performance in her own and the novice’s efforts to help children learn (e.g. the practice of teaching). In order for mentor teachers to offer guided assistance, they must see themselves as teachers of teaching and view prospective teachers as learners (Feiman-Nemser, 1998a). Sandy had initially assumed that interns were “highly skilled people” who brought a wealth of strategies and methods to the classroom so that “they would almost be another teacher in the classroom” (interview, 3-16—99). She, like most classroom teachers, needed sustained support in taking on her mentoring role, a role that stands in sharp contrast to traditional student teaching whereby teachers often step out of the way so that novices can demonstrate their competence. If mentors are to develop the capacity to help interns learn the practice of teaching through joint work on authentic teaching tasks, the field-based university teacher educator must create educative experiences for mentors to learn the practice of 223 mentoring. Thus in the outer triangle of mentor teacher development, I as the university teacher educator served as the teacher, helping Sandy, now the student, learn the practice of mentoring. This meant that as a mentor Sandy was a teacher both to her students and her intern while also being a learner of mentoring herself. What makes the mentor teacher developer’s work so daunting is that she is not simply a teacher of mentoring; she also must act as a teacher of teaching to both interns and their mentors. Mentor teachers generally become teachers of the practices they employ in their classroom. When teachers draw on their own conservative practices to help novices learn to teach, interns often adopt and perpetuate these traditional practices. For example, Sandy thought in terms of activities when planning for instruction. Not surprisingly, her interns did the same thing. Sandy attended more to students’ outward behavior than their intellectual engagement when teaching. Likewise, both Sue and Liz tuned into students’ outer, not inner attention. In the same way that teachers cannot teach children what they themselves do not know, collaborating teachers cannot mentor novices into a teaching practice they themselves have not developed. Thus field-based teacher educators are faced with the dual challenge of helping mentors develop both their mentoring and teaching practices while simultaneously supporting intems’ learning to teach. Core Tasks of Teaching and Mentoring What does it mean that mentor teacher developers are teachers of teaching and mentoring? Recent professional frameworks and standards documents (e.g. Danielson, 1996; National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, 1994; Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, 1996) suggest that the practice of teaching consists 224 of several core tasks or major responsibilities. These tasks -- creating and maintaining an effective learning environment, planning, teaching, assessing students’ learning, and analyzing teaching -- can be thought of as five responsibilities which generally define the practice of teaching and thus the content novices need to learn. A corresponding set of mentoring tasks arises that illuminate how mentor teachers can help interns learn this content (see table 1). Table 1: Core Tasks of Teaching and Mentoring Core Tasks of Teaching Core Tasks of Mentoring Create and maintain an effective Investigate and explain how the learning environment for learning community is established and maintained Plan Generate, revise and assess written plans with intern Teach Assist, observe and document intem’s learning to teach Assess students’ learning Guide intern in examining evidence of students’ learning/understanding Analyze teaching Analyze intem’s teaching efforts and help her develop analytic skills needed to learn from her practice Through their “legitimate peripheral participation,” novices gradually acquire necessary knowledge and skill by participating to a limited degree in the actual practice of the expert (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The expert, in this case the mentor teacher, not the intern, is ultimately responsible for carrying out the practice. As the intern becomes more adept, her participation in greater aspects of the core tasks of teaching expands. By 225 engaging in increasingly complex performances through observation and guided assistance by the mentor, the novice learns how to talk about and actually do the practice of teaching and in so doing develops an identity as a member of the teaching profession. Perhaps the greatest challenge I faced in mentoring the collaborating teachers lay in helping them develop a practice I had never fully articulated. While I had developed my capacity to mentor interns, much of that knowledge and skill was embedded in my action. Thus when I set out to provide mentor teacher development, I did so without a clear blueprint of what I was trying to help the collaborating teachers learn. In hindsight I realize that I devoted little if any time as a mentor developer to the first core task of teaching/mentoring, namely helping interns understand how a learning community is established and maintained. Rather, I focused much of my work with the CTs on the remaining tasks. For example, I devoted a good deal of time to planning. Chapter four chronicles what happened in the study group when we tried to clarify what planning entails and how we could help the interns learn to prepare for instruction. We also investigated records of practice around an intem’s unit plans in order to consider how to assess and support her planning (see chapter three). Moreover, chapter five describes my one-on-one efforts to help Sandy learn how to co-plan, observe and assess her intem’s teaching and help the intern develop the capacity to learn from her practice. In terms of the collaborating teachers learning these core mentoring tasks, they needed to develop both propositional knowledge (e.g. developing an understanding that their role entailed helping interns learn to teach) and procedural knowledge (e.g. developing the skills needed to enact that role). Study group sessions where we studied records of mentoring practice and clarified a curriculum for the intems' learning tended to 226 produce propositional knowledge. Experiencing a sense of disequilibrium or cognitive discomfort often led the collaborating teachers to learn that there were important pieces of their mentoring practice that they still needed to develop. But in order to act on these insights in practice, the collaborating teachers needed to develop their actual skills. Assisting Sandy's mentoring performance by jointly engaging in core mentoring tasks with her enabled Sandy to develop the necessary procedural knowledge to guide and support her intern's learning to teach. This research suggests that studying records of practice and other forms of analytic group work create important opportunities for mentors to gain "images of the possible" and thus develop a deeper understanding of their role as school-based teacher educators. However, developing the "know how" needed to carry out that role came through assisting their mentoring performance. Mentoring as a Form of Professional Development Even though collaborating teachers must strengthen their teaching and mentoring practices, developing one practice can often build a bridge to strengthening the other. Mentoring, like teaching, is a professional practice that must be learned through a process of ongoing inquiry about how to make reasoned judgments in the context of action (Ball & Lampert, 1993). Both practices entail learning how to pay careful attention to what learners say, how to recognize within their ideas connections to the content they are trying to learn, how to respond in ways that further their understanding, and how to assess learning in the context of instruction. Mentors must develop the same kinds of analytic and observational skills that classroom teachers must develop in order to transform their teaching practice. Whether learning the practice of reform-minded teaching or the practice of mentoring, teachers must “hone their skills of observation and 227 analysis, coaching and assessment, collaboration and inquiry” (Feiman-Nemser, 2000, p. 36). They must develop the tools for the study and improvement of practice. Thus mentor teacher development is a form of professional education, reflecting the “new” paradigm of professional development that has arisen in response to criticism of conventional models of professional learning.1 The “new” paradigm of professional development rests on the belief that teaching is a professional practice that must be learned in and from practice (Ball & Cohen, 1999) because its knowledge is situated in practice. In other words, teachers themselves must continuously assess, adapt and generate knowledge about teaching through the investigation of its central activities. Leaming the practice of mentoring, like teaching, means that teachers must develop new ways to analyze and talk about practice characterized by serious thinking and openness to questions of meaning. For example, mentors must discuss how and why they plan for instruction, to articulate the reasoning that lies behind their intended action. This creates real challenges. Because teachers are often isolated in the privacy of their own classrooms (Lortie, 1975; Little, 1990), they rarely have opportunities to talk collaboratively about teaching in sustained and rigorous ways. Mentors must also engage the intern in jointly constructing plans for teaching, knowing when and how to explain and elicit, question and directly instruct, privately assess and offer feedback. In addition, mentors must use conversation as a tool to help ' Traditionally, teachers participate in district-sponsored “one-shot” workshops and training sessions where they have few opportunities for meaningful collegial interactions (Little, 1993). Instead, outside experts disseminate fragmented, shallow and pre- packaged information about instruction (Hawley & Valli, 1999), knowledge that is disconnected from teachers’ immediate problems of practice (Lieberman, 1996) and the specific contexts in which teachers work. Teachers are then expected to implement what someone else knows or believes without ongoing assistance. 228 interns learn in and from their teaching practice. As mentor and intern jointly engage in these authentic teaching activities, conversation becomes “the chief vehicle for analysis, criticism, and communication of ideas, practices and values” (Ball & Cohen, 1999, p. 13). In other words, their talk supports shared inquiry and the construction of knowledge, creating opportunities to investigate practice, to negotiate shared meanings, beliefs and expectations and to acquire skills. Believing that mentoring is a form of teaching and a means for professional development, I deliberately focused on helping the CTs develop their mentoring rather than their teaching practice. Whether teaching children or interns, mentor teachers must clarify a curriculum to be learned, assess the learner’s strengths and vulnerabilities in light of that curriculum, and consider how to structure opportunities to facilitate that learning (F eiman-Nemser & Remillard, 1996). I reasoned that if the CTs could develop the analytic and observational skills needed to direct intems’ learning to teach, these skills might naturally carry over into their work with children. The case study I presented in chapter five around Sandy’s learning to mentor supports this belief. Over time the insights Sandy gained into the practice of mentoring led her to uncover and address vulnerabilities in her own teaching practice such as needing to strengthen her own ability to plan for instruction. For example, when Sandy began to understand that part of her mentoring role entailed asking her intern probing questions around her written plans, Sandy realized that she did not know what questions to ask because the lessons always looked “great.” Once Sandy identified vulnerabilities in Liz’s planning, she began to recognize that her own planning reflected those same weaknesses. Until she could strengthen her ability to plan, she was “an unskilled person 229 teaching an unskilled person.” Her subsequent co-planning sessions with her intern, Sue, demonstrated that Sandy more deeply understood two central aspects of planning: (1) the need to consider what students may already understand about the content to be learned; and (2) the need to deepen her own subject matter knowledge. Sandy’s learning to mentor parallels Sharon Feiman-Nemser’s work with Kathy Beasley. Sharon and Kathy’s joint work on authentic mentoring tasks led Kathy to confront some of the contradictions in her own thinking and teaching (see Feiman- Nemser & Beasley, 1996). As Kathy began to understand the importance of articulating her own practical knowledge to her student teacher and developed the capacity to do so, articulating her ideas and beliefs about teaching led her to reexamine the fit between her espoused and actual teaching practice. In both cases developing the analytic tools to keep learning and growing as mentors became a bridge for Sandy and Kathy to begin assessing and' transforming their teaching practices. Challenges to Developing a Corps of Mentor Teacher Developers I was fortunate to have a unique set of learning opportunities that positioned me to address mentor development. Returning to classroom teaching for a year under the guidance of a masterful teacher helped me increase my capacity to teach for understanding. As a tmiversity liaison, I also received sustained support in becoming a serious learner of mentoring. First, I had opportunities to do the work with assistance. Initially I was paired with an experienced, exceptional liaison who provided both much- needed “images of the possible” and on—the-spot assistance. In addition, I received “behind-the-scenes” support. Chapter one describes a pivotal series of mentored experiences I had with a graduate seminar instructor who helped me prepare for 230 - mentoring encounters by suggesting specific moves and offering explicit language to use. I also participated in weekly university liaison meetings where we clarified a curriculum for interns’ learning and discussed difficult situations that we faced in our ongoing work. Second, I was able to learn in and fiom my own practice. Self-study played a critical role in helping me develop an investigative stance and increasing my capacity to help interns learn in and from their teaching efforts. Tape recording and transcribing mentoring events for systematic analysis with my colleagues taught me the value of creating and studying records of practice as well as making public my practice for our collective scrutiny. In essence I developed the very analytic skills that I needed to help interns and their collaborating teachers develop as learners of teaching and mentoring. Self-study continued to create opportunities to learn in and from my practice as a mentor teacher developer. My graduate experiences are not typical. Currently most university field-based teacher educators are untrained graduate students or faculty without particular expertise for this kind of work (Lanier & Little, 1985; Byrd & Foxx, 1996). If colleges and departments of teacher education are to take mentor teacher development seriously, this means that developing a corps of mentor teachers depends on developing a corps of university field-based teacher educators who can provide sustained assistance in learning to mentor. However, issues of resource allocation, the current university reward system and a lack of university faculty positioned to provide sustained support on a larger scale create daunting challenges. Most large preservice programs, MSU’s among them, rely on graduate students to teach undergraduate courses and provide field supervision. However, graduate students 231 are often novices of teaching themselves, perhaps let alone capable of mentoring interns or supporting mentor teachers’ development. While it seems self-evident that graduate students need serious, sustained support in gaining a deeper understanding of the practices they are trying to teach, colleges and departments of education are not in a financial position to offer it. Reducing the number of interns graduate students must supervise or pairing experienced liaisons with newcomers so that they have increased opportunities to learn in and from mentoring practice is simply not financially feasible. Until established university faculty take up this concern and advocate for the reallocation of funds, large teacher preparation programs will continue to rest on the shoulders of graduate students, the ones who are least capable of guiding and supporting interns’ and mentors’ learning. Given the current reward structure in higher education, it is unlikely that teacher education faculty will take up this cause anytime soon. In order to advance in academia, faculty are pushed toward research and away from teaching (Boyer, 1990). Thus there is actually a disincentive for university faculty members to develop their own practice as field-based teacher educators or to develop graduate students’ practice as school-based teacher educators since such activities do not count toward promotion and tenure the way research does. What this means is that few university faculty are even in a position to help graduate students develop the analytic and observational tools needed to support intems’ learning to teach or collaborating teachers’ learning to mentor since they lack “insider” knowledge of the three practices embedded in mentor teacher development. Even if faculty were able to increase graduate students’ capacity to mentor interns and CTs, the already time-intensive nature of their current work with interns would 232 preclude field supervisors from taking on the additional responsibility of supporting mentors’ learning. I know that in my own work at Sandburg, supporting the collaborating teachers often left me feeling distanced from the interns. Spending less time with the interns meant that I knew them less well. Yet without direct knowledge of the intems’ circumstances, needs and abilities, I was not in as strong a position to mentor their CTs. Thus I found myself unexpectedly torn between my responsibilities to the interns and my responsibilities to the their mentors. I was not the only one who felt this way. In looking back at our CT study group sessions and my one-on-one work with her, Peggy told me: Our conversations are more useful when you have been in real regularly to see him [intern]. Maybe that means that you have less time to meet with us as a whole group. Maybe we meet for an hour instead of two hours. I know you worked with each [intern] for a long chunk of time on a particular unit or a lesson, so maybe you would have to cut that a little bit. I don’t know where you get your time. I don’t know how you divide it up. But I know that you being in there regularly [to observe the intern] will help m keep better tabs. (ctsg, 3-29-99) Like me, Peggy felt that when I was more directly aware of her intem’s strengths and vulnerabilities having observed him teach firsthand, l was in a better position to support her work with him. Yet I was unable to observe the interns as often as I once did because of the intensive assistance I began offering the collaborating teachers. Something had to give. Thus even if graduate students were positioned to address mentor teacher development, they could not take on this additional responsibility without increased compensation or some reduction in the number of interns they were expected to supervise. Given the current scarcity of resources in many universities, such reductions in intern load are unlikely. Yet unless we begin to rethink teacher preparation programs 233 at every level, innovative initiatives such as fifth year internships will prove insufficient in improving the kind of instruction teacher candidates later provide to their own students. Implications for Policy, Research and Development Recognizing the unlikelihood of systematic structural reform, where does this leave university teacher educators who must continue to operate within the enormous constraints of current programs? In this final section I lay out several recommendations for policy, research and development. In terms of policy recommendations, one modest means of "scaling up" may lie in moving strong, thoughtful collaborating teachers such as Sandy into university liaisons positions where they can work as teacher leaders and help other CTs develop their mentoring practice. Once classroom teachers such as Sandy have developed their mentoring practice, they could be folded into university liaison positions where they can support and guide collaborating teachers and their interns. Of course, CTs like Sandy would not be able to serve as liaisons in addition to full-time classroom teaching and mentoring. A residence in mentoring program could be established to free strong mentors up to serve as liaisons for 3-5 years before returning to classroom teaching and mentoring interns. In terms of research, more graduate students and university faculty should be encouraged to become practitioner-researchers who can use self-study both to identify and investigate central issues in field-based teacher education and to use their practice as the basis for scholarly writing. The creation of the Center for the Scholarship of Teaching at Michigan State is a promising means of helping faculty use their practice and 234 field-based work as a site for research. Currently more educational researchers are attending to issues of quality in self-study research (see for example, Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001). As such guidelines continue to be established, university faculty who engage in self-study may be in a better position to have their work "count" as scholarly activity. Such practitioner-researchers would be well-positioned to develop a growing collection of records of mentoring practice that can be used by field-based teacher educators in their work with mentor teachers. As I discussed in chapter three, one of the ways that professional developers can help novice and experienced teachers develop the analytic and observational skills needed to study practice is through the use of records of practice. Such records provide a shared experience in viewing, interpreting and discussing teaching and learning. Using records of my own mentoring practice created nearly insurmountable difficulties, however. Had I had access to mentoring artifacts disconnected from the CT study group members, I may have been able to avoid some of the challenges that arose during our investigations. In the same spirit that Lampert and Ball (1998) have developed The Mathematics and Teaching through Hypermedia Project, a multi-media, computer-supported learning environment for the study of reform-minded teaching and learning of mathematics, we need to build a database of examples of thoughtful mentoring practice that follow a mentor teacher developer over time. Working with Sharon Feiman-Nemser, David Carroll and I began working addressing this goal by collecting artifacts of our mentoring work across an entire year, but we have done little more than collect the raw materials. The videotapes, observation notes, lesson plans and various other artifacts must be 235 catalogued, stored in a created hypermedia environment, then crafted into a coherent focus for investigation. In terms of next steps, we need to develop usable records around the core tasks of teaching and mentoring, in other words build a curriculum for mentors' learning. Once such records are developed and organized, teacher educators would need support in learning how to use them as a means of engaging mentors in a new kind of professional talk about practice. As Cohen (1998) acknowledges, “even the best materials are not self-enacting” (p. 185). In order to create a rich storehouse of mentoring artifacts akin to Lampert and Ball’s multimedia environment of mathematics teaching and learning, a parallel curriculum for teacher educators would need to be developed. Finally, this research suggests that more research is needed to examine the relationship between the kinds of mentored experiences collaborating teachers participate in and whether and how those learning opportunities influence their subsequent work with novices and children. Currently, very little research "links studies of teacher leaming to teaching behavior and student achievement" (Wilson and Berne, 1999, p. 203). While the data chapters suggest that the Sandburg collaborating teachers developed a more sophisticated understanding of their role as school-based teacher educators and that they began to develop a stronger mentoring practice, most notably Sandy, it is unclear what impact those new understandings and mentoring skills had on the kind of instruction they provided their interns. Perhaps most importantly, in supporting a classroom teacher in becoming a stronger mentor, what impact if any does that learning have on the kind of instruction she provides to her students or her intern provides to 236 children? Such questions need to be pursued in order to better understand what role professional development can and does play in changing teachers' practices and in turn contributes to students' learning. Beyond these more global suggestions, I intend to return to the data set to investigate a number of unanswered questions. For example, I worked intensively with Peggy to support her in addressing a number of problems her intern faced in becoming a thoughtfirl beginning teacher. However, our joint work did not lead Peggy to make many changes in her mentoring practice. What might account for the different outcomes in my work with Peggy and Sandy? In addition, our study group sessions consisted of studying records of mentoring practice (discussed in chapter three), determining a curriculum for the intems' learning to teach (discussed in chapter four) and discussing emergent problems of practice. I did not systematically analyze the study group sessions where the CTs raised concerns about problematic situations they faced. What are the benefits and drawbacks of relying on recollected experiences versus grounding our conversation in records of mentoring practice? 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Sandy acknowledged that they were starting later than normal. After lunch count and attendance were taken, Sandy invited the students on “her side” of the classroom to the large group area. The overhead projector was already set up with an overhead on it. A tape recorder sat next to the overhead and was cued up as well. Sandy turned the overhead on. Students from Kelly’s side of the room joined the large group area. Sandy encouraged the students to find a good spot where they could see. When she asked, “Are we all set to begin?” several students who had not yet found a place to sit did so quickly. In order to quiet a child who was talking, Sandy tapped the child’s head while saying, “We need good active listeners and we need beautiful singers.” Sandy then pointed to the screen that contained the words to a song. Sandy: Who knows what this lifelong guideline is? [S. raised her hand as she asked the question, inviting kids to raise hand in response] childl: No put downs. Sandy: What’s a put down? child2: If you don’t want to play with them and you say no, that’ 11 hurt their feelings. Sandy: Something that might hurt their feelings inside. Is there any other way people put down others? [Sandy calls on someone with his hand raised] child3: If you hit them. Sandy: Yeah, you could hurt their feelings inside but you could hurt their bodies. Do we do put downs in primary block? students: NO. Sandy: You guys are no put down experts. 248 As Sandy moved toward the tape recorder to begin the song, a child explained that ignoring is a good strategy to use. Sandy acknowledged that ignoring is good to do if someone is bothering you because then you won’t say something that might be a put down. Sandy started the tape recorder and used her finger to follow the written words as she and the kids sang a song about no put downs. It seemed that the children were familiar with the song and they sang it with her. In between verses, Sandy leaned down to a child sitting in front of her and asked her if she could see the words on the overhead. Sandy told the kids they did a good job. She then went on to explain what would happen during their busy day by taking them through the schedule. A poster always displays the day’s happenings and it changes everyday. Small signs with symbols and short words explain what each activity will be. Sandy pointed to the poster as she walked them through each activity: off buses; here for group time; no put down song. She explained, “In just a minute we’ll do all our calendar activities. Then comes buddy reading. She alerted her students to the fact that they had new desk buddies and new reading buddies today. Other activities included running around the track; responsibility time; author of the week; at-home project presentations; recess; lunch; music/gym. She also explained that the kids would be making invitations for Open House which would be held later that week. She said that families may not know about it and it would be good for them to come to see all the different areas of the classroom and see all the neat things they had done so far. Sandy then moved on to Calendar Time. She pointed to a list on the wall that showed the order of the kids to come up who did specific jobs for calendar time. As Sandy began to unfold the flag, the child with that job came up and held the flag. The kids got up without prompting and put their hands over their hearts. Several boys punched their hands into their hearts. Sandy said, “I’m trying to think now, what did we say about hitting ourselves? Is that a put down to ourselves?” Immediately the boys stopped. Sandy continued, “Can we put our hands on our hearts without hitting ourselves?” She modeled how to do so. The kids followed suit. During the pledge, several boys did not seem to be paying attention. Sandy’s team teacher, Kelly, walked to the back of the group where the boys stood and said the pledge next to them. Her presence seemed to calm them down. Kelly remained seated with the boys on the floor for the remainder of the large group activity. After everyone said the pledge, the kids sat down without being asked. Sandy then ran through the remainder of the calendar activities. The children responsible for particular jobs around the calendar came to the front of the room without Sandy’s prompting. At one point she asked the kids who were responsible for “Teddy Tummies” to come up, but she noticed that they had not done their job. She asked the whole group, “Did they get to do their job today?” Several kids said no. Sandy said, “Oh that’s okay. No problem. Tomorrow we’ll get those Teddy Tummies all figured out.” The calendar crew came up and one child pointed to the days of the week while the students sang a song about it. The child did not move the pointer quickly enough as the kids sang, so Sandy walked over and asked the kids to sing at the same pace as the 249 pointer. Sandy then held the pointer with the child so that she could help her correctly move the pointer to each day of the week. After she asked the calendar crew to say the date, she asked the large group, “How will we write the date on our papers today?” Several kids provided the right answer (9-23-98) but several stated it was 9-1-98. Sandy then did a think aloud. “Let’s see...” Sandy then began saying the months of the year out loud beginning with January. She held up one finger for every month she said. When she got to September, she asked the group how many fingers were showing. They replied, “Nine.” Sandy explained, “So September is the ninth month. What day is it?” The kids responded, “The 23rd.” Sandy continued, “So I’ll write 9 dash 23.” Sandy then reminded the children that the calendar wall has information that is there for them to use. If they forget the date, rather than ask the teacher, they could use the information on the wall to remember. The “meteorologists” described the weather. As they talked, two kids on the floor were chatting. Sandy walked up to them and put her hand on their shoulders while the weatherrnen gave their forecast. Sandy asked them if they thought jackets were needed at recess. They said no. A child replied, “Yes, we need them.” Sandy said, “Well you know, you can make that choice, can’t you? You can decide that at recess time.” Once all the calendar activities were completed, Sandy said, “That’s our last job. We might add some more later this week because you are getting so good at completing morning jobs.” Then in a very quiet voice she said, “Right now, though, it’s time for buddy reading. We need to find our buddy and a nice spot in the room.” The kids did so. 250 APPENDIX B WHAT LIZ AND JAN NOTICED ABOUT SAN DY’S TEACHING Jan explained that rather than watching Sandy, she watched her own collaborating teacher, Kelly. She noticed that during large group, Kelly went over and stood next to some kids who were wiggly during the pledge. Then Kelly sat right down on the floor with the students to help them keep their attention. At another point, a girl got up to use the bathroom. Kelly redirected her, asking the child to sit back down. Liz’s observations focused on Sandy. Liz noticed that when two kids were showing how they had done their job, Sandy often posed questions to the whole group. She thought this was a good way to keep everyone’s attention. She also noticed that Sandy posed questions to the kids who completed the job so that they could explain why they did what they did. She also was struck by the idea of having the kids write their own invitation for Open House. Liz explained that she had just read an article for her graduate seminar about the importance of emphasizing children’s written words. She surmised that had she not just read this article, she would not have thought much of the writing activity other than it being “cute” to send a homemade invitation home to parents. Liz also reasoned that parents would have a harder time refusing to come after seeing that their child had made a personal invitation. Liz noticed some of the management moves Sandy had made (e.g. tapping child’s head or shoulder, stating what her expectations were). She also noticed that Sandy only called on students who had their hands raised. In addition, she noticed how Sandy handled the situation with the two children who had forgotten to complete their Teddy Tummies job. Liz knows that Sandy uses a discipline program called Love & Logic. Liz thought that the incident was a good example of the program. There was no need to make the kids feel bad for forgetting - instead, the natural consequence was that they didn’t get to come up in front of the group. There was no need for humiliation either - Sandy reassured them that they would be able to catch up and do their job tomorrow. That way the whole group would not have to wait for them to do it at that moment which would have slowed the pace of the lesson down. 251 APPENDIX C FIRST CO-PLANNING RECORD OF PRACTICE (Liz and Pat) Liz gave an overview of her literacy unit on quilting, one of her passions. She wants the kids to see that a quilt is a story on fabric. Here are some of the activities she has planned: 0 class quilt - each child designs his/her muslin square. Liz and a mother will sew quilt together. 0 guest speaker - student’s mom is quilter. She brings in quilt and talks about it. Liz shows her own “novice” quilts 0 personal quilts - each child is given index cards. They draw on them when something significant happens in school. At end of year, they choose one and put together for class quilt that will hang for next year’s group. 0 Thanksgiving cards - create quilt design on front. Copy Thanksgiving poem about families being like patchwork quilts on the inside. 0 patterning activity for math - design their own patterns on worksheet. literacy - write a “quilting” story of their own - something significant in their life. include dedication page, copyright page, and all about the author page. When I asked Liz what would be helpful to focus on, she wanted to think about how to launch the unit. Initially she said the Opening activity should motivate the students to learn more about quilts and help them connect their prior knowledge to quilting. At this point in the conversation, we were looking through the stack of picture books about quilting, thinking about which one made sense to use first and how. P: And what about the [Tommie DePaola] story might seem helpful in using it as an introduction in terms of length, in terms of whether or not it’s engaging? L: Well, it will be engaging because they really like him. The little girl in the story is their age. It’s about the quilts being a story. This one’s entertaining but not quite as informational as this one [Keeping Quiltl. That’s why I’m leaning toward this one. But I like the entertaining too. I don’t want this to be boring. I was thinking maybe the first day I should... I don’t know. P: Say what you’re thinking. L: Okay, well there was a girl today in TE 802 who said that her CT introduced the seasons unit by becoming Mrs. Ditz, the teacher. She was in the bathroom. When the kids came back from recess she came out and she was wearing a fluorescent pink raincoat buttoned backwards with these little antennae things. She came running out and said she was from the planet Rice Krispies and there they have three seasons called Snap, Crackle and Pop. She then described Crackle where she basically used 252 words to describe fall. Then she said, “You guys have anything like Crackle?” and they’d say, “It’s fall, silly!” That I thought would really get them excited about it but I’m trying to think how I can do something about that with quilting. Do I wear a quilt and come running around the room or.... : Good question. : Not such a good idea is it? : Probably want to have something underneath it, that’s for sure! [laughter] That’s very different than saying “I want to start with something informational” versus “1 want to start with something entertaining” and earlier you had just said “I want to have the opening be informational.” : I totally did until today. I was planning the whole time on using The Keeping Qpilt which is some of the reason why I asked you this question about introduction. I started thinking, “Am I going to get them with this? Am I going to draw them in and keep them entertained?” : Can you say more what you mean by entertained? : Like I think learning should be fun. If they’re having fun, they’re learning. I just want to make sure that this is going to be a lot of fun for them and if they have a chance to be actively engaged and participating in what it is that I’m teaching them rather than me just standing up there and telling them about what a quilt is. I’m trying to think of a neat way to get them involved. Like an opening activity that will get them involved. : It seems to me like there’s a difference between involvement and fun. It sounds like you said if they are having fun, they are leaming. I want to throw out the idea that, and I think it’s something that we talked about on the phone the other night, that sometimes learning can be painfirl. When there is this disequilibrium that we enter into, that’s when there is opportunity for growth. So I want to challenge you a little bit to be thinking about what you mean by fun and to flesh that out a little bit. Earlier you wanted it to be something that’s engaging, something that’s going to grab their attention, motivate them to want to learn more about quilts, that’s going to sort of set the stage for what’s going to come next. Those four big pieces are very different than saying “I want it to be fun for them.” : Yeah. Well, fun is like, I don’t know. I was just thinking that fun would be the circle around all of the things that I want. You can still make it fun and touch on all of those things. So that’s the challenge - trying to find ways to keep it fun and still deal with all this other stuff. 253 What questions and impressions came to mind about Liz and her unit as you read this excerpt? What is one issue or question you would want Liz to follow up on from this piece of the conversation and how might you invite her to do so? What moves did Pat make during this part of the co-planning session? Questions or concerns? 254 APPENDIX D SECOND CO-PLANNING RECORD OF PRACTICE (Liz and Pat) Later in the conversation, we thought of the students’ journal writing as a place to help them see they are good story tellers. L: They would have shared their piece during buddy reading with someone else. Maybe we come back to group time later on during the day and talk about - maybe their buddy would stand up and discuss the piece that was read to them. I might ask questions like, “Why was that story so good? Do you think that this was a good story? What makes a good story teller? Was it exciting?” Those sorts of things. P: What makes a good story teller? That’s a great question for us to consider. L: I don’t know. See that’s something I should do some research on if I’m going to do this. Story teller. I don’t know. What do you think? Engaging. [pause] Creative. [pause] Thoughtful. [pause] Relevant to their lives. P: Relevant to their life? To whose life? The reader? The writer? L: Both. P: I’m stumped, too. I think it’s a good question to consider. What makes a quilt a good story? L: Memories. It’s a great way to - I think that’s something I should be including in my unit somehow - that it’s a great way to represent a family because most of these stories are about family members and how they put their whole story together on a quilt. That seems to be something I kind-of didn’t touch on and I don’t know why because it’s in every single one of the books. P: So you’re noticing a theme across the books - quilting is used to tell a family story. so maybe one of the important things about a good story is that it shares something that is important to the storyteller, something significant like family. [pause] L: Can’t I narrow the focus when they - oh, I don’t know - they’re choosing a piece from their journal that they think is important and I don’t want to narrow the focus that they choose a piece about their family. They’ve all at some point or another, they almost write about it everyday, about their brother, their mom, their dad, their sister, they went to the park. So we’d probably get a lot of pieces anyway that have to do with families. Maybe we could talk about commonalties among them. What did they notice about the pieces they shared today? And hopefully somebody will say that a lot of them wrote about family members. 255 P: The only thing I’m thinking about, though, is that if they’re sharing it during buddy reading so they’ll only be able to compare to their buddy’s story. There’s the question of whether or not you want that to come from them or whether or not you could explicitly say, “As I was going around listening to people during buddy reading,” L: I can say that? I would like to be able to say that. See that’s the thing- so often we’ re saying that kids should be able to develop this idea on their own. And it’s okay now and then to just come out and say this is what I’m hoping you’re going to get out of it. This is what I’ve noticed. You’ve probably noticed it too? What does Liz seem to be working on during this part of the conversation? What would you want her to do next in terms of continuing to plan her unit and why? What moves did Pat make during this part of the conversation? Questions or concerns about them? 256 APPENDIX E CURRICULUM OF PLANNING Developed by Sandburg CTs January 11, 1999 Getting inside the content strengthen one’s own subject matter understanding consider one’s own connections to the content gather, explore and assess curricular resources, including national, state and district benchmarks/standards develop worthwhile purposes, goals, objectives determine how the content fits with larger curriculum and ties into other areas Considering the students determine if the content is developmentally appropriate consider individual diflerences of the students (their strengths, weaknesses) - learning styles - modalities - multiple intelligences assess their prior knowledge consider how to help kids make connections to content based on their experience anticipate what might be diflicult for students to understand consider the students’ emotional and physical needs - where the lesson fits into the school day - whether they have been sitting a while etc. Mapping out the actual lesson choose activities that are linked to stated purposes and help students make meaningful connections to the content consider the sequence of the lesson (what should come first, second etc.) develop Introduction (or anticipatory set) - lays out the content to be taught - helps students see why the content is important and relevant to them - captures their interest and gets them motivated to learn (hook) - ties what will happen today with what came yesterday and what will come tomorrow when planning activity, map out the following details: - directions (paying attention to language and sequence) - gather materials needed and how students will use them - specific questions to ask students - transitions develop opportunity for students to practice or process ideas - is there a vehicle for students to share their understanding/learning with each other? - how over time can the students eventually teach the content to someone else? 257 develop closure . - recap what was learned - set stage for what comes next consider how to assess student learning - how to reteach later to students who do not yet understand - consider how the assessment can help determine where to go next consider ways to create space for flexibility in the lesson 258 APPENDIX F SANDBURG LESSON PLAN FORMAT Developed 1-18-99 Clarifying the content * Objective/Purpose - what do you want the students to learn/understand? - why is this content important/relevant to them? * Pre-assessment - how will you find out what the students already know about the content? - what may be particularly difficult for your students to understand? * How does this content fit into the larger curriculum? Designing the lesson * Opening - what signal will you use to get students’ attention? how will you “hook” the students so they want to learn more? how will you connect what you did yesterday to what they will do today? how will you help the students see how the content is relevant to their lives? * Activity/Learning Task - what is the task? directions? materials needed? specific questions to ask? transitions? * Closure - how will you recap what happened? - how over time will the students be able to practice and eventually teach what they have learned? * Student Assessment - how will you find out what the students did/did not understand? - how will you use that information to modify your instruction? 259 Augps APPENDIX G “PRIMARY BLOCK INTERNSHIP SCAF FOLD” Developed by Sandy, July 2000 t Week Four: Setting Up the Learning Environment Arranging the classroom Making desk/cubbyhole/mailbox nametags Constructing table groups (buddies, youngers/olders) “Welcome Back” bulletin board Unpacking supplies September Week One: Creating and Assessing the Classroom Community Establishing rules and routines: Procedure book, Debugging, ln/Out, Conflict Resolution (bridge), Australia, Lifelong Guidelines, Lifeskills Modeling procedures Introduction to before school procedure and agenda Weeks Two and Three: Reassessing and First Time Assessment of New Students Letter, sound, sight work identification inventories Beginning the process of reading for non-readers: phonemic awareness actvities, letter/sound book, penmanship, big books and charts Taking anecdotal notes during Buddy and Independent Reading: book sense (front/back, left to right, one to one correspondence, top to bottom, reading strategies (picture cues, initial sound/symbol, meaning) DRA, reading recovery running records Taking anecdlotal notes during writing: front/back, left to right, top to bottom, symbols, random letters, beginning, middle, end sounds, “think spelling,” upper/lower case letters, ability to read their writing back to you, punctuation sense Reading and Writing Checklists Math anecdotal records and checklists: Reviewing first grade math checklist concepts and preassess for second grade readiness October Week One: Co-Planning, Designing and Teaching Lessons using Lesson Plan Format in Math and Reading (Phonemic Awareness) Reviewing frameworks document to choose the performances the students need to be successful Reviewing preassessments completed in September for specific skills needed Designing purposes/goals for unit/lesson (Big Idea) Making a Concept Map of skills students will need for mastery Gathering resources Constructing Lessons/Questioning Ongoing and post assessment (performances the students need to be successful) 260 Week Two: Making Parent Contacts and Preparing for Open House 0 Keeping records and documenting student progress, growth ,challenges - Contacting and sharing feedback with parents face to face, by note, by phone 0 gpen House as “sharing our classroom” time / sharing with parents conference ates Weeks Three and Four: “Trying on ” Teaching 0 Designing and teaching lessons for mini-groups in math and reading Taking anecdotal notes and using checklists Making positive contacts with parents Meet for Lunch (small groups of students) Organizing data to share with parents during Open House Recording progress on report cards November Week One: Preparing for Conferences 0 Using portfolios and other artifacts to show growth 0 Student led conferences 0 How to be honest with parents about progress/ growth while remaining positive 0 Intern role in conferences Week Two: Preparing for Guided Lead Teaching 0 Looking at the “Big Picture”: Writing Goals 0 Creating concept map of skills to meet the goals 0 Gathering resources 0 Assessment: knowing your learners, designing a preassessment that mirrors the performances you want the students to master, creating tools for ongoing assessment, designing a post assessment tool in which the student will perform 0 Introducing and reinforcing the skills: Designing the Lesson 0 “Fine tuning” along the way: Making adjustments, flexibility, going with the “teachable” moment, using the children’s learning from today to plan for tomorrow, reteaching to those who continue to struggle with the concepts 0 Reporting growth Weeks Three and Four: Guided Lead Teaching 0 Using videotaped lessons to observe and identify strengths and weaknesses in your preparation and interactions with the students during the lesson 0 Using CT notes to think about your practice of teaching 0 Tools for taking in the whole picture: Teaching the lesson, creating means for and being aware of evidence of student understanding, what to do about “off task” students, utilizing classroom management strategies, being prepared for the unpredictable, timing issues (the lesson that goes too fast or too slowly) 0 Assessing your performance: What went well, what you would change, how you would change it 0 Setting goals for growth: Identifying areas you want to excel in and designing a plan for meeting your goals December Weeks One, Two and Three: Taking on More Responsibility 0 Calendar Activities 0 Author of the Week 261 Individual science/social studies lessons co-planned with the CT and co-taught/ independently taught Guided Reading Groups: co-planning lessons and teaching these independently, reviewing and fine tuning lessons with the CT, keeping anecdotal records and using checklists Taking rrmning records to measure growth Writing: Conferencing with students, keeping anecdotal records of progress, creating and recording goals with students for growth, publishing Math: Co-teaching whole group lessons and teaching to small groups, keeping anecdotal records, checklists 262 IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Illllall11111111111[llllllzllllillllztllll